Tina Ayres Owns Van Gogh’s Ear

Dear family of great talent, let us welcome Tina Ayres as the editor-in-chief, administrator, owner and creator of Van Gogh’s Ear. She controls this site she created. It is all her doing. And I am proud of her for proving to be quite innovative. Being in charge of Van Gogh’s Ear means never once letting anyone down. Tina Ayres understands this. She will continue the tradition of always showing every contributor the utmost respect and follow through on the promises she makes to those who contribute their work. These are among the reasons that Van Gogh’s Ear was given entirely to Tina Ayres and shall remain under her complete control. May the amazingly imaginative family of Van Gogh’s Ear welcome her, reassure her and embrace her. She is a sensitive soul. So let’s all bring her joy. For she’s the one who began this site, seeking out original works, conducting fascinating interviews and bringing people from all walks of life, everywhere in the world, together for the creation of more and more new volumes of this momentous anthology series. And she is very serious about her responsibilities as the editor-in-chief. Thank you, Tina Ayres, from poets, artists, writers, and new talents everywhere, for keeping Van Gogh’s Ear alive! Our love for you will grow with each moment of your time devoted to giving us more extraordinary realms to explore through Van Gogh’s Ear.

New York Apocalypse

I remember a lightning flash blinking in the sky after three days of darkness. After that things dropped over after something fell from the sky. There was a great noise and screams and then crumbling buildings but at the same time it was clean.

While I experienced only slightly more than a sunburn Julius suffered third degree burns and had to rob an abandoned drugstore for medication. Soon I joined him going into places. At first we ate ourselves silly in empty restaurants. Naturally there was a chance the food was contaminated, but we had to live. I won’t describe the horror that greeted us all around. In many ways, however, it wasn’t really horror. There were no tortured looks on the faces of the dead. People seemed to be sleeping. As we stepped over the bodies, I said to Julius, “I don’t feel anything. The lightning flash must have done something to me – taken away a part of my soul.”

Julius wept as he turned on the soda spout in a store where we’d gone to get supplies. The soda was cold, and I put my mouth to the spout and drank heavily, a part of me feeling like a rat because I wasn’t mourning the dead who were all around me on the floor.

In my apartment, we ate what we could from the things we brought back with us. We had to eat fast because there was no refrigeration and everything good would soon spoil. Then there’d be nothing except the canned goods and the cereals in the supermarkets, so we filled up on submarines, cold Swiss cheese and beer.

We looked out over the city. There was not much movement and we could see ruins everywhere. I told him how quiet everything was, and how we were lucky to have each other. “I wonder how many others are alive,” I said.

Julius said there had to be other survivors.

“We will find them in time,” I said. After all, while it seemed that the worst was over, I still felt scared, especially at night when we could hear strange sounds in the city. Perhaps some parked cars or a home gas range suddenly and for no apparent reason exploded. But more than anything, I feared a return of the lightning flash. I knew I was lucky to be alive, even if it appeared that only Julius and I had survived. We weren’t Adam and Eve, or even Adam and Steve, but at least we were company for each other. And who, after all, would want to bring children into a world such as this?

Often I went around to television appliance shops and searched to see if I could find a live signal. I never even got static. With all communication snuffed out, I felt the severity of the situation even more.

The entire country may be like this,” I told Julius. “Even the world….What are we going to do, live in New York until we die?”

One night Julius was weeping again into his pillow. I didn’t say anything but sat at the kitchen table and buried my own head in my arms. I said a prayer to Saint Mark – I had an icon of him on my desk. Looking at the icon now, in light of the setting sun, I could feel it trying to speak to me. But attempting to discern the message of the saint was confusing and unclear. It seemed only to communicate a general faith that things would be okay – different, but okay. Julius wanted to leave New York in order to find other survivors; he was convinced there were none here, otherwise someone would have answered our daily round of whistle blowing. Julius wanted to go into an Old Navy store, get two knapsacks, fill them up with necessities then take off to see the rest of the country. We argued about this every night. My arguments were the same. We are safe here, so why move out? God knows what awaited us out there. “Since the towers fell, I vowed I would never leave New York like a scared rabbit,” I told him. But Julius said he’d been having this recurring dream about another lightning flash.

“If there’s another one, I know we won’t be so lucky,” he said. I finally listened to him.

So Julius and I went into a store and found two knapsacks, sleeping bags, and other equipment we felt we might need. Then we found two bicycles. It wasn’t possible to take an automobile from the street. Something about the flash had rendered them inoperable. The bicycles seemed the best bet.
We rode back to the apartment through midtown Manhattan. We had to swerve our bicycles around the cadavers. We were both shocked when we saw the corpses of Anderson Cooper, Madonna and Lady Gaga all within a block of one another. Mayor Bloomberg was slumped down inside a NYPD patrol car. Cardinal Timothy Dolan was laying face down on the steps of Saint Patrick’s cathedral.

It was all I could do to keep pedaling. I no sooner thought “Who’s next?” when we saw all the employees of Goldman-Sachs melded together like a Jacques Lipchitz sculpture; something apparently had struck them in a such a way that their bodies joined and formed a twisted, discombobulated blob that seemed to reach for the stars.

Sometimes we got off our bikes and stooped down to examine their faces. A couple of times I had to fight a compulsion to touch them about the forehead and smooth their hair back with my hand. Julius had no such reservation, however. He would touch a cheek or stroke a chin and say, “Look at this beautiful person!”

It was truly sad and, on the night we packed, we didn’t say much to one another. I placed the icon of Saint Mark inside my knapsack. Tomorrow we would be off.

We rode across midtown Manhattan and then came to the freeway. I hadn’t expected to see a line of stopped automobiles and trucks stretching into the horizon. Most of the vehicles were on top of one another and many were scattered over embankments and whatnot as a result of the flash.

An overturned Greyhound bus really got to Julius. I thanked my lucky stars I wasn’t in a car when it happened. My hope is that everybody died instantly. It was difficult to steer a course through the sea of automobiles. In some areas they blocked the highway and Julius and I had to walk our bikes way around them.

We both stopped dead in our tracks when we saw what looked to be Sarah Jessica Parker atop a flagpole. Perhaps Ms. Parker was thrown from one of the thousands of cars trying to leave the city. We then saw a just a face on an embankment with hair that looked like Donald Trump’s. We had gone only about a mile out of New York when Julius turned to me and said, “We’re going to die if we go on like this. I say we go back and forget the whole thing.”
Once I’m on the road going somewhere, I cannot turn back.

I said, “Julius, that wouldn’t be sensible. You said yourself another flash was imminent.”

I stood beside my bike and surveyed the landscape. Not far ahead of us was a family-style restaurant next to a farm. Behind it were fields that looked like they might house cattle or horses.

“Come on, Julius, we might be lucky and find a wagon and then we can hitch up a horse.”

Julius looked at me like I was mad. “Next you’ll be saying we’ll find saddlebags.”

We walked our bicycles over a field and, as we approached the restaurant, I said how amazing it was that a place like this was so close to the city. It was startling because you could still see the skyline and here we were in what looked like open country. By the time we walked on the property, we saw that there was one horse left alive, an old thing with pink spots, walking backwards over the trough. It looked kind of crazed. All the other horses were dead; there was no sign of people although they had probably died inside the buildings.
Julius studied the horse. “I think we should pull it!”

“I’ll just look in the shed to see if there’s a wagon or something, and you can lasso that horse for us.”

I found a flat wagon in the back of the shed, the kind farmers use to transport bales of hay. With a little work we could have fashioned it into a Conestoga wagon.

Julius was having trouble with the horse. It was kicking something fierce. The flash had driven it crazy. But he kept at it, shouting at it and using his arm to drive it toward the flat car. We finally got it hitched. “I don’t like this one bit. We don’t know where we’re going, and this horse is half dead,” Julius said.

All I could think of was the great covered wagon Mormon pioneer trek to Salt Lake City. “Haven’t you ever wanted to be a pioneer? There’s destruction all around so we really have no choice. It’s up to us to explore, settle, and pick up people, whatever. Life must go on at any cost.”

“Why? Life is futile and without meaning. The dead are the lucky ones.” Julius was very unhappy although I knew he really didn’t want to go back to New York. He was sick of Manhattan every bit as much as I was.

“You know,” I said, “it won’t be so bad. We have each other, and we have this horse. We don’t need other people. Everybody else is dead anyway. Our love is all we need. “

I really didn’t feel that exuberant. I was trying to sound more positive so Julius would get a move on. He was starting to bite his nails and take on that faraway look that meant he would soon hang his head and sink into a complete depression. If past behavior was an accurate barometer, he’d stop eating, keep insisting that life was futile and useless, and mention suicide as a possible out. Then he would suffer an anger streak that would inevitably draw us into ugly arguments.

Finally we were ready to see if the horse could pull the wagon. I was doing the driving. I moved the reins and shouted to the horse. It started moving, not very fast, but it did move. When we were a little way off from the farm, I asked Julius what he wanted to call the horse, and he said “The End.”
“Now that,” I said to him, “is a perfect example of your pessimism; why not The Beginning?”

We ended up calling the horse Flash.

That night, we were sitting around a campfire next to a housing development. Flash was tied to a telephone pole while we cooked some eggs. Julius was pretty upset because he had to step over this pretty girl lying nude on the floor in order to go into the kitchen. He was really depressed, thinking he had fallen in love with her and wishing he could bring her back to life.

When Julius was drinking his coffee, I went into the house to take a look at her. She looked like she was taking a nap. “I see what you mean,” I told him, “but she’s dead.”

Julius looked away. As much as we loved each other, he needed a woman.

When I got up in the middle of the night, I saw that Julius wasn’t in his sleeping bag. I called out his name, and then thought of that poor girl lying in the kitchen. I thought, oh no, not necrophilia!

(From the two novellas, Walking on Water & After All This, which will be published in paperback form in early 2013 by Starbooks Press, currently an e-book).

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based author/journalist, the author of nine published books, including: The Cliffs of Aries (1988), The Boy on the Bicycle (1991-1994), Manayunk (1997), Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia (2000), Tropic of Libra (2002), Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture (2005). In 1990, Mr. Nickels was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Hugo Award for his book, Two Novellas. He was awarded the Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Architecture Journalism Award in 2005 for his book Philadelphia Architecture and his weekly architectural columns in Philadelphia Metro. He has written for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News, the Philadelphia Bulletin, City Paper, The Broad Street Review and the Huff Post and The New Oxford Review. His travel essays have appeared in Passport Magazine. His column, Different Strokes in the Philadelphia Welcomat in the early 1980s, was one of the first out lgbt columns in a mainstream newspaper. He’s currently the City Beat Editor for ICON Magazine (New Hope, PA), a contributing editor at Philadelphia’s Weekly Press, and a weekly columnist for Philadelphia’s SPIRIT Community Newspapers. Mr. Nickels also writes for the Broad Street Review. His novel SPORE was published in July 2010. His novella Walking Water & After All This  (1989)– is currently available on Amazon and will be published in paperback in early 2013. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, 2003-2012.

At 40 His Wife Begins to Write Poems

Each night, they come to her in dreams,
and when she can’t listen anymore,
she wakes and writes in darkness,
the shadows from the street falling
through the blinds and onto the paper,
like whispers.

She feels her husband beside her,
sleeping in a world without dreams,
or horizons, a beached whale, all breath
and cold flesh. When she reads her poems
to him in the morning kitchen, he’s puzzled,
frightened. Don’t worry, she says, I love you
more than anything.

She dreams one night she is driving
in the desert, wind moving through the air
like lean snakes. Hungry, she stops
near a gray shed. Sees the bones
of three angels lying on a table,
and urinates into a tub
filled with photos. In the corner
her mother stands in red stockings,
her feet swollen like salmon,
her tongue adrift in a dark sea,
her lips shaping sighs, maybe questions,
each one as different as blue
and yellow.

When she wakes, the lines are scrimshaw,
circles flattening under the weight
of triangles, gashes, red birds in trees.
Her husband puts down his coffee,
searches her eyes. She knows
what all of it means.

John Guzlowski’s writing has appeared in Garrison Keillor’s Writers’ Almanac, The Ontario Review, Chattahoochie Review, Exquisite Corpse, Modern Fiction Studies and other journals both here and abroad–many of which are now defunct. His poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes. He blogs about his parents and their experiences at http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/

Murmuration at Six O’Clock

Seurat could have captured this,
the swarm and pulse
of a thousand starlings
over St. Peter’s Basilica
as the light dips and the rain-tipped
Roman sky stains mulberry.
As far as the eye scans, birds rise
in ventricled waves
of fibonacci spirals,
gulls joining in, crows,
the parakeets from the Borghese,
till the air fills and bells
in each campanile sound
for every vespered swerve.

Nessa O’Mahony was born in Dublin and lives in Rathfarnham where she works as a freelance teacher and writer. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland literature bursary in 2004 and 2011, a Simba Gill Fellowship in 2005 and an artists’ bursary from South Dublin County Council in 2007. She has published three books – her first collection, Bar Talk, appeared in 1999. Her second, Trapping a Ghost, was published in 2005. A verse novel, In Sight of Home, was published by Salmon in 2009 and a third collection of poetry will be published in 2013/14.

Inescapeable

I have selected this edgeland because it is lucid still, despite its troubles, its singing down of the human heart. Antony & Cleopatra and all that. Here a design seducer oversteps souls, voluptuous lips, eels and irises, dismisses the overriding assessment of light bare feet. The horizontal manners of the ribcage are self-induced and dependent on the weight of attributes (such as a fiery color) to cure the opposite heart-shaped lily. Fierce hairy leaves are aimed at masculine positions of age and dress; the whole tumbling jungle gets thrown. A damaging Spanish gardenia materializes and, for personal reasons, a curtsey flitters open your kiss.

The west wind turns delicate, elsewhere emotion intervenes with its immobile grip and we face the intrusion with confidence and feudal abruptness.

What rhythmic splendor we borrowed from the cramped space of the infuriated opera, its breath a perpetual restringing of untied phrases. We rubbed the cherished prolific with serious insight. Our static experience, veined and polished, now comes stuttering from hips and nerves; meanwhile Venus, pliant, clothes antiquity with insouciance.

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in Pennsylvania and has lived in Europe since 1973. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and many magazines throughout Europe and the States, including Van Gogh’s Ear: Volume 2. Her collections are: Dolores: The Alpine Years and When the Body Says It’s Leaving(both from Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn); Lovers Eternally Nearing (from Editions Thomas Howeg, Zurich) and Ant Small and Amorous (from corrupt press,Paris).

The Train to Viareggio, an ode

The train to Viareggio was crowded. This particular train went on to La Spezia. A bunch of kids got in near Pisa, heading for the beaches in Cinque Terra, where the water is bright blue and there’s a nude beach. They sat on the floor of the train blocking the aisle, so the conductor couldn’t get through if he tried. They had an hour to go because they would have to switch trains at La Spezia. There’d been a strike the day before, and the 90-degree heat sent the pent-up demand to the beaches of the Italian Rivera. We were going to Viareggio because we could rent an umbrella and chairs, and the food was cheap. The overloaded train was noticeably slower as we moved along. The landscape had slowly changed, and now we looked at salt marshes where the smell of the sea was strong. We stopped at a commercial port, and then stopped at Viareggio Centrale. When we stood up, a couple got up from the floor and took our seats; we gently stepped around the people sitting in the aisle as we headed for the door.

“We don’t get out here. We have a few stops to go,” a man with an Australian accent said to some people as they were starting to get up. They sat down, a little disgusted. Air conditioning is not Italy’s strong suit, and there was almost none on the train.

We stretched our legs. The trip from Florence had been longer than we’d expected. The kiosks had not been working at Florence SMN, and it took some time to get our tickets. We walked down the avenue to the beach, past oleander-lined streets, and across a busy coastal road, stopping at the Supermercato Conad to buy some bottled water and snacks.

The path to the bright yellow umbrella was hot and burned our feet. We sat in the chaise lounges, under the umbrella that had cost us twenty euros, and looked out over the sea from one of the oldest resorts in Europe, the place where Czars spent the long Russian winter, and where Shelley was cremated after he and his friends drowned when their sailboat sank in a sudden summer storm.

Naked children ran down the beach, not seeming to mind the hot sands. The blue water was full of people, many of them with water toys, and as we walked along the beach we could see that the marble-capped mountains were covered in a fine haze. That’s when the body washed up on the shore directly in front of us.

Fully clothed, right down to fine leather boots, the unfortunate sailor had recently drowned. There were no signs of life, no need for heroic CPR, nothing would help him now; several people had their cell phones out and were calling the police. Others scrambled to get their little kids away from the dead man. We helped the life guard pull him by his arms, so the waves wouldn’t drag him back out to sea, and then we sat on our towels waiting for the authorities. He was white, so we knew he was probably not an illegal immigrant from North Africa; he was very pale white, and had a pretty face.

Two paramedics, both with large sweat rings under their armpits, carried their gurney through the broiling beach sand. They checked the body, and then waited. The coroner would have to release the body to them; he was on his way. A small, skinny man with a thick moustache came to the beach. He and the two paramedics were the only ones there who were fully-dressed. They asked the life guard a bunch of questions, and the skinny guy filled out a form.

The two paramedics strapped the body to the gurney and carried him off the beach. There was a depression in the sand shaped like the back of a dolphin where the body had lain. We looked at the depression, and then carefully went in the water. People were talking about him. My Italian is bad, but I could understand bits and pieces, like a bad recording that fades in and out. Someone said he was English, that they knew him, or had seen him. He had a sailboat. There’d been a bad storm last night. Maybe he had been caught out in it. He had a young wife up in Genoa. She must know something is wrong by now.

We decided to go in for a swim. There was nothing more we could do. The water was cold at first, but that was because we were so hot from being on the beach in the sun. I went in up to my neck, and stood looking at the dome on top of the hotel Excelsior and the mountains in the background. The sun was getting more intense. I got out of the water first, showered on the beach, and dried off under the umbrella. She swam for another hour. She likes the water a lot more than I do. After she settled in, I asked if she was hungry

“No. Too hot to eat right now.”

“True.”

“That was very strange,” she said.

“You mean the man on the beach?”

“Yes.”

“That was very sad. I wonder what happened.”

“People mentioned a storm. He had a sailboat”

“Yeah. I could make out a little of what they said. Sailboats are bad in storms.”

“It probably took him by surprise.”

“He must have had a lifeboat,” I said.

“Maybe it was a small sailboat. Too small for a lifeboat.”

“I haven’t seen a small boat since we got here. This is the yacht club set if I ever saw one.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so rich?”

“Maybe he shouldn’t have gone out in a storm?”

“I saw a reporter talking to some of the people on the beach. We can get a paper tomorrow.”

“It’ll be on the news.”

Later we ate sandwiches at one of the tables in front of the small snack bar, and then went swimming again until the sun started to set and the sky began to change color. The late train back to Florence was crowded, and we got to the apartment after dark. The next morning there was a blurb in the paper. The man had been English, and his wife was in Genoa at their summer home. He disappeared the day before yesterday, the night of the bad storm. His boat was found washed up on shore. It had sunk with the lifeboat still attached. His widow wanted to cremate his body on the public beach, but the authorities said no. They insisted that he be cremated in a licensed crematorium. She planned on throwing his ashes into the sea from the spot where he had washed up on shore.

“We’re going.” She said, not a question.

“Of course.”

We took the train back to Viareggio. The weather had turned cool, so the train wasn’t crowded. Heavy clouds and light rain turned the water grey, and hid the mountains. We walked out on the beach. A pale woman in a white wedding gown opened a Grecian brass urn and cast beautiful ashes into the gentle surf. They sat on the surface of the blue-grey water for a moment, and then sunk into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Joseph Zeppetello Lives in the Hudson Valley, and has published short works of fiction in Iron Horse, The Little Magazine, and Copper Nickel. His novel, Daring to Eat a Peach, was published by Atticus Books. He is currently working on another novel, and is interested in writing stories that explore character, and has been experimenting with short works that incorporate a touch of the magical or the absurd.

SALISBURY, N.C. Even 50 years after her death, the interest in Marilyn Monroe remains insatiable. For serious authors, filmmakers and fans, the obsession with the Hollywood icon inevitably leads them to Salisbury, a place she never visited yet knew everything about. Credit the late Ralph Roberts for that. For the last three-plus years of Monroe’s life, Salisbury native Roberts served as her personal masseur and, probably, closest friend.

By most accounts, Roberts was the last person Monroe tried to contact the night she died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles.

Only two weeks ago, documentary filmmakers from Paris were here, interviewing Ralph Roberts’ nephew, Hap, who saw his uncle almost every day for the last three years of his life in Salisbury.

French Connection Films also spoke to Chris “Steve” Jacobs, the man Hap Roberts has made archivist for his uncle’s papers and all things Marilyn.

Together, Roberts and Jacobs have developed a Ralph Roberts website. They keep a Greensboro attorney on call, just to make sure nothing false is attributed to Ralph Roberts.

Working from Hap Roberts’ company, Statewide Title, they store anything connected to Marilyn Monroe in lock boxes off site.

Long after Monroe had died and mainly as a way to correct and set straight things written about her, Ralph Roberts started several versions of a memoir, which he titled “Mimosa.”

“There’s constant interest in that manuscript,” Jacobs says.

Hap Roberts and Jacobs hope to publish the memoir some day, though putting the Marilyn years in chronological order and dealing with Ralph’s writing style have been difficult.

“He never took advantage of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe in any shape or form,” Hap Roberts says of his uncle. “We don’t want to profit from it, either. We just want to do what Ralph would want done.”

Hap Roberts’ life keeps bumping into his Uncle Ralph and Marilyn Monroe.

He’s not complaining. He loved and adored his uncle, and through him appreciated the actress.

In recent years, Roberts and Jacobs assisted University of Southern California professor and author Lois Banner on her recently released book, “Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.”

Banner’s index lists Ralph Roberts on 19 different pages, and the book devotes considerable space to his brother-sister relationship with Monroe.

Bill O’Reilly’s best-selling book, “Killing Kennedy,” mentions Roberts on a single page. It’s one of the more famous Roberts-related stories because it essentially confirms the affair Monroe had with President John F. Kennedy.

O’Reilly probably gets it wrong, however. He writes that when Kennedy, staying in Palm Springs with Monroe, complains of chronic back pain, Monroe calls Roberts and puts him on the telephone with the president. The passage says Roberts offered a quick diagnosis and hung up after a few minutes.

But while he was alive, Roberts told the Post at least twice – in 1985 and 1993 – that Marilyn called him that night after the president had asked her how she pulled off her signature walk.

Monroe knew it was a variation on an exercise using a muscle that connects the thighbone to the hipbone through the spine. But when Kennedy asked her the name of the muscle, she couldn’t remember.

So Monroe called Roberts, put Kennedy on the telephone, and Roberts told the president it was the psoas muscle. And that was pretty much their conversation.

Paris filmmakers Ian Ayres and Eric Ellena are still in the United States interviewing people for their documentary, “Marilyn: Birth of an Icon.”

They describe it as a movie “about a sensitive, caring person trapped in the role of the world’s greatest sex symbol.” Their treatment of the subject, Hap Roberts says, is something of which his Uncle Ralph would have approved.

Forever cognizant of his uncle’s wishes to protect the Monroe he knew, Hap Roberts says he has only granted two interviews about Ralph Roberts since his death in 1999. One was for Banner; the other, for Ayres and Ellena.

When they were in Salisbury, the men filmed Hap and his wife, Annette, walking in City Memorial Park toward Ralph’s grave. They also interviewed Hap for an hour at his home and Jacobs for a considerable time back at the Statewide Title office.

They took pictures of several of the Marilyn artifacts Ralph had kept after the actress’ death Aug. 5, 1962. Ralph was among only a small group of people, including former Monroe husband Joe DiMaggio, who attended Monroe’s funeral.

Hap Roberts still has his uncle’s program from the memorial service.

“I grew up reading every book about her,” Ayres said in an email to Hap Roberts. “Now I find myself in the position of making the documentary I’d always hoped someone would.

“And your uncle Ralph meant so much to Marilyn. I know she’d be pleased.”

This year, Hap Roberts was invited to attend Marilyn Remembered’s Aug. 5 memorial on the 50th anniversary of her death. Marilyn Remembered is a fan club of sorts established in Los Angeles in 1982.

More than 400 people from all parts of the world attended the memorial service, according to Greg Schreiner, president of the group.

Hap Roberts wrote some words of tribute for his uncle which were read at the Monroe memorial, but he did not attend.

The photographs that exist of Ralph Roberts with Marilyn Monroe inevitably show him standing behind her, giving a neck massage.

Descriptions always mention how tall and handsome he was. Hap Roberts says his uncle was about 6-2.

Authors also describe a man who was a good listener – a Southern gentleman who was tight-lipped and trusted by the famous people he massaged, especially Monroe.

“She was very comfortable with Ralph,” Annette Roberts says.

Hap Roberts adds that his uncle purposely kept in the background, not wanting to be considered part of Monroe’s entourage.gg

Ralph Roberts’ acting career should not be overlooked, nor his military record.

He graduated with honors from Salisbury’s Boyden High School and Catawba College. He was attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when he volunteered for the Army before Pearl Harbor and World War II.

After Officers Candidate School, he rose to the rank of major and served as Gen. Joseph Stilwell’s assistant in the China-Burma Theater. During the war, he also was one of the first liaison officers from the Pentagon to the White House. In that position, he met President Franklin D. Roosevelt twice.

When Roberts was called back to active duty during the Korean War, he held the reserve rank of lieutenant colonel.

His military obligations behind him, Roberts headed for New York to follow up a love for acting he developed in college and community theater productions in Salisbury.

Through much of his life, he seemed consistently drawn to famous or soon-to-be-famous people. Roberts attended the method acting school of Lee Strasberg with fellow students such as James Dean, Shelley Winters and Marlon Brando.

In 1954, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine behind actress Julie Harris, who was starring in the play, “The Executioner.” Roberts was the executioner.

Roberts actually met Marilyn Monroe for the first time at Strasberg’s New York apartment in 1955. He wrote in his memoir that she was “one of the most radiantly beautiful creatures” he had ever seen.

“And when I say ‘creature,’ that was it,” Roberts wrote. “An animal. The blue-whiteness one sees sometimes in the stars of a desert night. White-blond hair, clear-white complexion framing violet-blue eyes.”

Roberts had parts in long-run Broadway productions such as “Witness for the Prosecution,” “The Lark” and “The Groom Wore Spurs.”

His first movie was Stanley Kubrick’s “Killer’s Kiss.”

To supplement his acting income, Roberts trained at the Swedish Massage Institute in New York, and he quickly became known among Broadway actors, film and television stars as the man who could help them relax before or in between performances.

The clients he would have over three decades, mostly in New York, sound like a Who’s Who in acting. He massaged, for example, Lauren Bacall, Richard Burton, Natalie Wood, Judy Holliday, Imogene Coca, Milton Berle, Red Buttons and Ellen Burstyn.

And, of course, Marilyn Monroe.

Roberts became Monroe’s official masseur in 1959, and for long periods, during her various marriages and romantic entanglements, would give her massages daily.

Roberts and Monroe forged a bond. She called him “Rafe,” the British pronunciation for his name.

They connected on the Willa Cather books they read, their spirituality and, believe it or not, Salisbury.

As Roberts massaged her at night, he spoke to her about his hometown and all of its places and people – down to men such as Irvin Oestreicher and Julian Robertson Sr. to the roasted peanuts at the Lash store and the winged statue on West Innes Street.

Together, Roberts and Monroe ran errands, ate meals together, attended parties and took plane trips across the country between New York and California.

Roberts was with Monroe the night she practiced singing “Happy Birthday,” the version she would famously croon to Kennedy.

They watched the 1960 Democratic National Convention together when Kennedy won the nomination. They were on the set together every day of “The Misfits,” Clark Gable’s last movie.

In addition to massaging Monroe between scenes and being her chauffeur, Roberts played the part of an ambulance driver in “The Misfits.”

When he was 9, Hap Roberts says, he wrote his uncle in the spring of 1960 after hearing Ralph had the part in “The Misfits.” Hap asked whether Ralph could have Monroe autograph a picture to him and also one to his 9-year-old girlfriend, Kay Snider.

A month later, the pictures came in the mail. His said simply, “To Hap, Marilyn Monroe,” but she had signed the cover of a Life magazine with her and actor Ives Montand.

“I still have it,” Hap Roberts says.

As his nephew recalls, Ralph Roberts drove one of the first Corvettes – a black beauty with red interior. Monroe enjoyed riding with him.

Hap remembers that his grandfather had one of the first televisions in Salisbury, “and we would all gather around and watch Ralph in early Kinescope productions,” he said.

His uncle had an apartment in Greenwich Village. Roberts says one night Ralph and another aspiring actor, James Dean, returned to that apartment to listen to records.

When Ralph was acting in plays in New York, Hap and his mother would visit at times.

“I met Imogene Coca in her east-side apartment, Judy Holliday and Dean Martin back stage and years later with my wife, Lee Strasberg and Al Pacino at Lee’s apartment in the Dakota, a year before (John) Lennon was killed.”

Hap Roberts even received some hand-me-down clothes, such as sportcoats, from Ralph Roberts’ clients.

“I grew into Milton Berle’s stuff when I was 18,” he says.

In those Marilyn years, Hap says, Ralph Roberts would travel home to Salisbury with numerous small checks from the actress he had yet to cash. Once Hap’s father, Harold, asked his brother to have Monroe make out one of the checks to him.

The next trip home, Ralph Presented Harold with a $100 check made out to him from Monroe. Harold Roberts carried it around in his wallet for a year, showing everybody. Then one day he cashed it in.

Hap Roberts couldn’t believe it.

“He said, ‘Hell, it was $100.’ ”

Hap Roberts cherishes the last years of his uncle’s life after he left New York and lived on Parkview Circle close to Hap’s office. They would meet every afternoon around 4 p.m., and Ralph would look after Hap’s dogs on the weekends.

Every Sunday evening was “Martini Time.”

Ralph Roberts would appear at Hap’s house at 5 p.m., bringing the Sunday New York Times with him, so Annette and Hap could read it later.

Ralph Roberts had a art deco martini set Monroe had given him, and once he brought it out for their Sunday ritual.

Hap and Annette, who also became close to Ralph, knew not to probe him for his memories of Monroe.

When he did talk about their relationship, they tried not to interrupt, savoring every detail and recognizing how much he loved and respected Monroe.

Ralph Roberts felt great remorse that he wasn’t home the night of Monroe’s death to answer her call. He lived close to the actress and could have been to her house quickly.

“I do think he probably carried that to his grave,” Hap Roberts says.

Something else Monroe had given Ralph was a box full of the chandelier crystals she had collected. Monroe thought the crystals had healing properties.

Ralph Roberts would sometimes hand out the crystals as gifts to friends.

Hap Roberts tells a funny story, too, of another Monroe gift to his uncle. After Ralph’s death, Hap was gathering his uncle’s clothing together for a donation to Goodwill.

He noticed a woman’s Burberry trench coat in the closet, but he figured it was a friend’s coat, left at Ralph’s house in the past. He placed it with the other things for Goodwill.

“About a month later, I found a list of Marilyn Monroe items,” Roberts says. “Sure enough, on the list was ‘Burberry trench coat.’

“Well, Marilyn’s coat is now protecting some unsuspecting lady in Salisbury from inclement weather.”

When Ralph Roberts died April 30, 1999, at his home, he was 82. Hap Roberts said he sat alone in his uncle’s house and cried until he couldn’t cry any longer.

Roberts noticed the stacks of memoir papers spread out everywhere in the living room. In the den, he also saw the open Willa Cather book that his uncle had been reading.

Up to the end, Ralph Roberts was chasing his friend, Marilyn Monroe.

Official Ralph Roberts Website: http://www.ralphlroberts.com/

The Associated Press: Talk of Marilyn Monroe lures curious to Salisbury

Sibyl

Her mother had died two months before and seemed very old. Sibyl could foresee her own frail hand on a white bedsheet and, beside the bed, a chamberpot to be sick into. At the time, she thought that she should remember to ask for youth along with years when Apollo begged for her love. She foresaw also the decline of an empire. She must remember to learn other languages. She would have decades to study, centuries. She must remember also to save treasure, so she could get through the fallow years comfortably. Life was just a balance: wisdom, folly; elation, despair; health, suffering. Everything comes to one, eventually.

Perhaps that was supposed to be consolation for not being made of stone. Still, she thought the knowledge heightened the pain, particularly when one knew what was coming. So: she cultivated in herself the talent of forgetting the future. That offered some peace.

A month ago, Apollo visited her as a lion, then a hawk, parading his power, which she could not abide. When he roared, she waved him away. They had met on a sunny day and then that night.

“I don’t think so,” she had told Apollo, but she had not meant it.

The next night feathers grew over his bright, sunny skin, and she almost allowed herself to be seduced, but at the last minute he became human, and she knelt on the beach. “I want a gift,” she said. “As many years as there are grains in this handful of sand.”

“Doesn’t that make you a prostitute?” He smiled a thin smile. He stroked his lovely, narrow fingers, as if he were a surgeon. “You’re selling yourself to the highest bidder.”

“Easy for you to say I’m a whore,” she said. “You have everything.”

“Very well. Let’s make the exchange.” He scooped up a handful of sand and flung it toward the star-filled sky. The sand smelled of fire, flickered in the air, glimmered, and she knew she had been given the years. He clutched at her wrist.

“If you call me a whore, then I’ll be one.” She stepped away from him. “I did not think I could be one, but as it turns out, I can.”

He grasped her shoulder. “You want more?”

She shrugged. “I want everything.” She looked at the unreadable stars. “I want to be a god.” Her mother would have said the same thing.

“I could have a hundred girls as pretty as you. But I chose you.” His eyes flashed and he leaned in. “I liked your shrewdness.”

She was angered and said, “I liked your power.”

He straightened up. “You can have your years. And with it, decrepitude.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Remember, until you are senile, what I have given you.”

Outlined in moonlight, he marched along the shore. Inside she felt a shaking, a rift from the past. She crossed her arms to keep from spilling out. The moonlight flaked on the sea, tapped on her eyelids when she shut them. She was, she thought, more like the moon than the sun, more like her mother.

She would need to forget him. She had been foolish to toy with a god, she knew that. But for now, the moon hung like a silver boat in the sky. The night breeze brought her the scent of hyacinth. The sound of crickets filled the air.

Cezarija Abartis’ Nice Girls and Other Stories was published by New Rivers Press. Her stories have appeared in Per Contra, Prime Number, Waccamaw, and New York Tyrant, among others. One of her flashes was included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 list of flash fiction. Recently she completed a novel, a thriller. She teaches at St. Cloud
State University.

http://magicmasterminds.com/cezarija/

How I Would Keep the Maybe One Eighth Choctaw Part of Me Alive

You better hope you never see angels on the rez.

                                                  —Natalie Diaz

Because you damn well know I’m no angel,
you might think, to accomplish this minor mathematical feat,
I would take up bow and spear and read the sign,
that I would crouch in copse and shadow,
learn the way of the warrior, learn the way
of crow and wily coyote; or that I’d bow
before the spirits of ancestors, learn the language,
teach it to the youngsters, keep it on their tongues;
or most of all, that I would chant and dance
under the stars, around and around the campfire
dance until the moon collapsed and from
behind the mountains the sun rose up saying Stop!
And you’re right, maybe I would do any or all of these,
but I’d much rather take up herbs and rattles,
and as a medicine man take my own advice
that the best medicine is strong medicine and kick the hell out
of the seven-eighths white ass part of me.

George Drew was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New York State, where he currently lives. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Toads in a Poisoned Tank, from Tamarack Editions,  The Horse’s Name Was Physics, from Turning Point Press; a third, American Cool, was released by Tamarack in 2009; and a fourth, The Hand that Rounded Peter’s Dome,by Turning Point in 2010. Drew was the winner of the 2003 Paumanok Poetry Prize, the 2007 Baltimore Review Poetry Prize, the 2008 South Carolina Review Poetry Prize, and was runner-up for the 2009 Chautauqua Literary Journal Poetry Contest, which also nominated him for a Pushcart Prize. American Cool won the 2009 Adirondack Literary Award for best poetry book of the year. A fifth collection, The View from Jackass Hill, is the 2010 winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press, 2011.

http://www.georgedrew.com/

Bad Girls

Believe me, they were thoroughly bad
but not in a sexual sense.

The sky wore a special transparent blue
those never tarnished noons in spring.
Sunsets in the fall glowed redder than today.

Getting away with practical jokes,
thinking other people didn’t count
or not in the same degree,

those girls decided the world was theirs,
yellow apple cut in pieces, one for each,
felt a fierce urge
to be noticed, either praised or blamed.

The reputation haloing their group
never shriveled, couldn’t shrink.

Also individual traits, you’ll add:
one self-appointed leader, mix of sadism and charm,
and the quiet, intelligent one who could almost have passed

for a scholar; the third, fan girl type,
egging others on with praise;

the upper-class poet who struggled so hard
to be ordinary, tough, with simple tastes;
and the loyal, brave child who did as she was told,
who could have died for a friend.

We’ll have to desert them, safe in the past,
leave well and less well alone,
leave them to their fate.
In any case, by now it’s way too late.

One victim resting among grassy dunes
turned her back toward you and them,
strategy of survival or to hide her tears,
impassive young woman under pensive pines.

Make no mistake,
bad girls were never particularly nice,
lacked compassion, made fellow students afraid
to return after summer to school.

Yet something of the charisma remains,
that dry energy still
crackling, sparkling where wicked girls would walk.

They have their admirers even today
who remember golden and green afternoons
in September or May

when wild girls made everything fresh,
wholly transformed, made it spring alive.

Helplessly, you admired
against your better judgment, your true ideals
such confidence and style.

In spite of all, you longed to be one of them
because the feeling they conveyed
by simply being around

was that no limitations could exist
while youth lasted, or life itself.

Wherever the girls happened to be
became the most important place
on the planet: they always appeared

as harbingers of something great,
dwarfing even themselves.

Any door, any gate swung open at their touch.
Leaving, such graduates took something away.

You live much more quietly now,
your mind suspended in the already lackluster air.
All bad girls gone, if not necessarily dead,
nothing matters now as it did to them.

Susanna Roxman, born in Stockholm, writes in English. Her father’s family is Scottish. She has studied at universities — including King’s College, University of London — in Britain and Sweden, and has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Gothenburg. Her poetry collections Broken Angels and Imagining Seals were published by Dionysia Press, Edinburgh; the latter book was supported by the Scottish Arts Council. A third collection of hers, Crossing the North Sea, is supported by Creative Scotland (the Scottish Arts Council + Scottish Screen), and will appear with the same publisher.

Susanna has poems in more than 60 journals world-wide, including Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Stand (UK), Orbis (UK), Magma (UK), Poetry Ireland Review (Republic of Ireland),and The Fiddlehead (Canada). She has also written a book of criticism, Guilt and Glory: Studies in Margaret Drabble’s Novels 1963-80 (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm).

www.roxman.info