A pondering of time and space

There are two things swirling in my mind today. One is an incident that happened years ago (years and years) and the other is a pondering of time and space (again) based on an announcement I saw for an open mic.

Recently I saw a headline about Beach Blanet Bingo. This sparked this memory, the incident, that involved a life-size cut out of a woman, a joke among co-workers and weird opportunity. At the time I was in Naples Italy in the Navy working an exhausting series of watches that, combined with living in the barracks where there was little peace and quiet, lead to a heightened and maniac type of humor and joking. One of my coworkers, let’s call him E. was also my supervisor or in the Navy lingo, our LPO (leading petty officer). E. was a skinny guy with a buzz cut and a dark beard. He had the classic military issue glasses (fondly known as birth control glasses), he walked with huge strides and sort of resembled the “keep on truckin’ man” of Robert Crumb. He was wickedly smart and had a subtle, though dark, sense humor. He was planning a trip somewhere and had made mention that he was hoping to get some quiet away from us and find an Annette Funicello “babe”. Of course, the word babe opened him up to our immediate ridicule and mockery. Because we worked shifts (two twelve-hour days/ two twelve-hour mids and then ninety-six hours off) we sometimes didn’t see E. for days at a time. But we kept the joke going by messages left in our mail boxes. (Messages in mailboxes) Shortly before E. was scheduled to leave my friend Kathy and I saw the Navy Exchange (NEX) had a life-sized cut-out in front of the building, a Kodak display of a woman in a bikini and we hatched a plan to “kidnap” this young lady. So as Kathy drove slowly past the NEX one evening well after closing time, I leapt from her Fiat put the cut-out in the backseat and we drove it back to the barracks. Later that night we took it across the quarter deck of the Admin Building, up the elevator, where the Marines asked way too many questions about what we were doing – anything to break the monotony of their watch – and we placed the bikini clad lady on the computer room floor with a Beach Blanket Bingo redux sign for E. As we later found out, E. took one look at it, folded it in two and carried it away. He went on his trip, he sent us postcards, Annette was never mentioned again, as were babes or bikinis. I hope now, all these years later, the Kodak campaign at the NEX did not suffer, after all, we were always buying film. At the time of the abduction, we had fully intended to return it to the NEX atrium.

The next thing I’m pondering, still two days after I first saw it, is an announcement I saw for an open mic where poets get 5 minutes and prose writers get 7. When I asked the organizer why, they explained that poetry reads faster than prose when read out loud. (Please snicker, I did) What?

I’m wondering how much time prose poetry gets.

So here is a prose poem, a poem about Naples, a poem about those Marine guards.

After the Snow

Naples Italy, December 1985

The Stars and Stripes ran a photo of a fishing boat on the beach at Licola, blue and yellow, with three inches of snow like rich upholstery along the bow, and oars wrapped in fine quilting. The first snow in Naples since 1937 fell as sailors, far from home and snow, opened windows and leaned out, cupping hands where the snow melted as it touched, and we sang let it snow, let it snow. Across the city, buses and cars tangled into greater gridlock, Fiats sliding into Maserati’s, Vespa’s sliding over cobblestones, men and women slipping on the ice walkways. On the base in Agnano, our small volcanic crater, the Marines, who guarded our gates, who spent hours every day, if not on duty, then drilling, or running or polishing something – these boys, whose average age was 19 – were in the parking lot in front of the building where the Admirals worked, making snow angels. Even those from the Deep South, who had never seen snow, were on their backs, taking their cue from the staff sergeant from Maine: jumping jacks while horizontal. And those of us who looked at their indoctrination and zealousness as a weakness, shouted down to them, our blessings as fine as the snow.

(Randon Fiat in a snow storm 1985)