"The Detroit News" by Tosh Berman (Detroit)

I’m living in a house that was built in 1899.  It’s huge.  I don’t know what makes a home a mansion, but I feel that I’m living in one.  A house that old always has secrets within its walls, attic, and basement.   I suspect that this house was built by the Ford company for its executives.  It has two staircases.  One for the family/owner of the residence, and the other for the servants.  The servant's staircase is small, steep, and one can easily hit their head on the ceiling as you go down or up.  The other is grand and very inviting, as the other one seems like a pathway to a dark place.   Every old home has a dark path from one questionable area to another.  Or, more likely a path from lightness to dark. 

Upstairs being the lightness.  Perhaps closer to the sky and its stars.  As you wander down the stairs (especially the servant’s entrance), you then turn a slight left, which will lead one to the basement. It’s here that one evening I found torn and frayed copy of “The Detroit News” from June 29, 1947.   It was near an old bottle of bootleg alcohol that for sure, came from the Canada side.   I never removed it, because I felt it was a grave site.  Perhaps not a human one, but a grave for a life spent, and I still think the spirit is in this house.  

The reason why I drink starting at 7pm every evening is that I feel the basement calling on me, to return to a tradition that stuck its tongue out to the old bitches and bastards who tell us what to do.  I don’t want to be told what to do, except by that old magic that is bottled up and sent over in a boat across the river from Canada to my mouth.  I never wanted to remove the newspaper, maybe because I feel if I touch it, it will turn to dust, or feel it’s not respectful to remove such an item placed in one’s (not mine) basement.   But I did remove the paper due that an article caught my eye.

The headline “Home Thugs Get $164,000; Bind, Gag 11”  got my attention, and as I started reading the article, it struck me the address of the robbery is where I’m living now.  It seems the house once belonging to, or at least he was the tenant, a Lewis Weiner, who had a party to raise money for a synagog building fund. It was a quartet of thieves, and they all wore masks and had revolvers.   None were hurt, thank god, but the funny thing is that I notice the date of this newspaper item is June 24, which was the date that I discovered this newspaper in the basement. 

The Purple Gang pretty much controlled Detroit with an iron fist, and wasn’t shy in bashing someone’s head in, if the need was there.  There was a theory that Weiner was part of the Purple Gang, and an off-shoot gang did the robbery to move into the Purple Gang’s territory.  Still, my mood is wearing a blanket of darkness, and the only bright spot in the day is when I start drinking. 

The Purple Gang used to smuggle booze from Canada to Detroit, and then elsewhere if there was any extra juice after the Detroit citizens finished their supply.  The liquor stores here in the Detroit area are called “Party Stores,” but most close by 9:00 PM. I buy cases of booze and place them in the basement, exactly where I found the old bottles.  I feel it’s a tradition of great importance, both for the house and yours truly.   To the Purple Gang, and all those who failed the American dream in their fashion on this day of despair, July 4th.  - Tosh Berman, Detroit. 

July 4, 2014

July 4, 2014

I can imagine what that boat trip with little Alice Liddell was like.  It seemed innocent enough, but that one little trip probably changed her life forever.  I remember Billy Gray telling me stories as a small child, of episodes from The Twilight Zone.  I saw the actual shows, but the way he told stories was way more effective, which means scary.  The thing is, I think Billy taught me lessons in narration.   Even though I knew how the story ended, it was the journey to the end of that narrative that was the most important to me.  So as I mentioned, I can understand why Alice was so entertained by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson story, but what amazes me is the manner in which Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll came up with such a tale in such short notice. 

When Dodgson told the story to the three little girls on the boat - Alice and her two sisters, he was just trying to amuse them, perhaps out of their boredom of taking this specific boat trip from Folly Bridge near Oxford to the village of Godstow.  In fact, the story is about a bored young girl by the name of Alice.  I always felt that boredom have a role in creating and doing art.  Speaking for myself I find boredom as a great source of inspiration. When Alice requested Dodgson to write down the story, so she can have it, clearly gave him the idea of making a book.  Eventually Dodgson gave Alice the handwritten manuscript of “Alice’s Adventure Under Ground, ” with him doing the illustrations himself.  He inscribed to her “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer’s Day.” The version he gave to her was 15,500 words, but he went on to do another version of the narration that’s 27,500 words, where he added the Cheshire Cat and the Mad-Tea Party scene.  

The beauty of Dodgson’s work is how he mixed up the world of pure fantasy. Yet it was inspired by natural science.   In a way he must have been like Sherlock Holmes in figuring out the narrative by what was around him at the time.  Nature usually brings me nothing but dread, but here is a story that is based on a certain type of nature, that to my taste, is a perfect cocktail of a book.  The book works like a great Rube Goldberg machine, which is always elaborate machinery or system to do very simple things.  As a writer, I want to explore my world in such a fashion where I tear up my room and then put it back together again.  But of course, all under my power of observation, which is entirely subjective. 

The TV show “Twilight Zone” had a huge effect on me as a child.  It was the first time that I realized that there may be another sort of world out there, besides the one I’m living in or on.  Billy’s telling me of the stories from the TV show had a profound influence in how I perceived the landscape that lay in front of me.  If you dig around, or look at that world in a certain light, you may find another form of life or perhaps an entrance to another world.  I’m fascinated that the ‘other’ world of “Alice” was all underground.  I think here of the sky or above the sky as being endless, but how far down does the core of the earth go?  Surely it can’t be endless.  In my generation, it comes above, but perhaps in the era that Lewis Carroll lived in, the answer was placed under the ground.  I’m also intrigued by the thought that people when they die, are buried under the ground.  Does death and mad-Tea parties go hand-in-hand?

Alice Liddell appeared to have a long and rather normal life. Yet what must it have been like to be the model for one of the most eminent literary character of all time?  The only thing I can compare what I imagine is her oddness of seeing copies of those books in a bookstore, is seeing my father’s face on the Sgt. Pepper cover in gift shops.  It is part of me, but at the same time it has nothing to do with me.  It is the property of someone else.  Clearly I have an emotional sense of ownership of that image, and Alice was the spark that lead Dodgson to create his masterpiece.  Inspiration comes from all places, and once we know where it comes from, our lives are and will always be affected by the attention one gets that is not from us specifically, but being the son of the artist, and her being on that boat trip, changes everything.