Write me a Letter

said, ”was some English kid who trained to be a spy in India by practicing memorizing. His teacher would lay out thirty or forty assorted items on a tray and the kid would have say thirty seconds to try and remember them all. And that is what Precious was doing, remembering all the ones she didn’t have a chance to write down.”
    ”Oh,” said Annie. ”That clears that up, I don’t think.”
    ”Sure you do,” I said. ”Frank told me he caught you thinking only last week.”
    ”Did not,” said Frank.
    ”So how did you do, Precious?” I said.
    ”You tell me,” she said airily. She showed me her address book; two whole pages were full of entries like, ”Jacobson, BH”; ”Martin, WH”; ”Tauber, BA”; ”Hall, SO”; ” Flint , PA ”; and so on. I quickly deduced that the letters stood for Beverly Hills , West Hollywood, Bel Air, Sherman Oaks, Pasadena , and so on; the little dumpling had managed to list about thirty names altogether.
    ”Brilliant,” I said.
    ”Thank you,” she said. ”I naturally didn’t bother with any of the ballrooms or restaurants or clubs the band played in.”
    ”Excellent,” I said.
    ”Now what, Donny-poo?”
    I shrugged. ”We’ll have to see. Frank, you know anybody working out of Robbery? I used to know this midget lieutenant, he was about the size of Little Orphan Annie in flats, but he moved to Vice last I heard.”
    ”What about Jasper?” said Annie. ”Jasper Johnson.”
    ”Yeah, right,” said Frank. Jasper turned out to be a cop Frank had once shared a patrol car with who’d since made detective; he worked out of the same LAPD station downtown as did my beloved brother Tony, but Tony toiled in the basement in Records, and Jasper would be up on the fifth or sixth floor somewhere. Anyway, there was nothing more to be done right then, in the line of business, that is, so we made our farewells and went our separate ways into the not-so-gentle California night. On the way back I told Evonne what a fake book was—a book containing basic chord charts for hundreds of standards, for use in emergency by unprepared bands. Too bad the same thing didn’t exist for unprepared Pis.
    And aging Casanovas.

5

    I cannot, nor will not, say I slept like the proverbial top that night. When I awoke not too early the following a.m., my sheets were soaked through and so was I. Luckily for Precious, I was in my own little bed; I’d driven back to my place to sleep because, although it happened from time to time, Evonne wasn’t completely comfortable with my staying over at her garden apartment, and if there is anything worse than waking up to soaked sheets, it’s waking up to sheets soaked by someone else. Evonne did not seem to mind spending the occasional night of love and laughter chez moi, though; she’d even recently taken to leaving the odd bit of clothing or makeup behind. I wondered if it meant something Freudian, like she left articles behind to give her a reason for returning, but then I figured she already had good reason—my sweet and practiced caresses.
    As I hadn’t drunk at all the night before hardly, it couldn’t have been the booze that caused the ooze, excuse the poetry, so it must have been my dreams that drenched the seams. Although, as usual, I couldn’t remember anything about them, and I wonder if that means something. But they must have been your veritable nightmares, no doubt brought on by the company I had recently been keeping, like having your molars drilled without anesthetic by Himmler or having to sit through all of Waiting for Godot again without a full hip flask and a portable opium pipe.
    I used to dream a lot about islands, hence I would suppose my firm penchant for Hawaiian chemises, but I don’t need Freud to tell me what islands stand for in dreams, they stand for islands, they stand for escape and planter’s punches and sandy kisses and, dream of dreams, not one Boston Celtic fan within a million miles.
    ”‘No man is an island,’” someone once wrote, which always seemed pretty obvious to me, unless he’s the Isle of Man.
    ”‘Little islands are all large prisons,”’ someone else wrote, which is obviously rubbish. I think he meant to say, some islands, like Devil’s Island , are prisons, but so what? Everyone knows that. My island, call it what you will, Daniel’s Dunes, The No-Clothes-At-All Atoll, in whatever balmy southern sea it may lie, is no prison, believe me. I’ve been in prisons, and not to take a