Hot Candy and Other Stories: From an Old Man’s Closet

By Gordon Cohn

A young man envisions an open avenue to early career success only to see it closed by authority. A retiree discovers that, for reasons unclear, each of the key relationships in his life has soured. An early love reappears to a widower in an unexpected encounter. A betrayal has unexpected results. Despite talent, high energy, and commitment, a young man's plans for a long career in the classroom is derailed. In the desert, a businessman has a revelation. A good man is falsely accused and responds to humiliation. Twenty years after he disappeared, an old friend resurfaces with a story to tell.
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This collection, undertaken in late life, attempts to examine some of life's mysteries: how early dreams and expectations may go awry; relationships may not be what they seem; evil appears at any time and in many guises; love is not easily defined, explained, or sustained.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796072747

Gordon Cohn

IVAN J. HOUSTON, a graduate of UC Berkeley, is the retired CEO of one of America’s largest black businesses. He was also the first black director of some of the nation’s largest corporations. He served in the US Army from 1943 to 1945. Houston lives in Los Angeles, California.

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Copyright © 2019 by Gordon Cohn.

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-7960-7276-1

                 Softcover        978-1-7960-7275-4

                 eBook              978-1-7960-7274-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 11/18/2019

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For Lois

the special seven

and the lady in twilight

CONTENTS

Hot Candy

In Flight

Dining Out

A Public School Education

A Happily Married Man

Arrest and Release

Erg Chebbi

The Memory of Bruno Metzler

Looking for Joey Kedvale

Conversation in Twilight

HOT CANDY

T o this day I don’t know who did me in. The only guys who knew about it were friends.

On a Monday afternoon in late October, 1953, the column was off being set in type, and I was trying to figure out whether to be ashamed or elated, when Dewey Dooley came into the empty newsroom sucking on a bent pipe and carrying two sweating bottles of Pepsi. He handed me one, lowered himself onto the corner of my desk, and struck a match off his ass. Dooley’s pipe was forever going out and he could never make it through a memory without a dozen matches. Most of the time he was sucking air and sour juices.

Dooley was business manager of the campus daily. He had come to the university on the GI Bill and stayed on. He was past forty and carrying an executive belly no longer fit for crawling through Sicily under fire.

A year ago, not long after I won the column, he came in to introduce himself and say my stuff made him laugh. We discovered we admired the same writers. Now he often stopped on the way home, filled his pipe from the yellow plastic tobacco pouch he carried in his shirt pocket, and talked about his favorite writers—Mencken, Liebling, Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith, about the war, and about the way the campus used to be. He preferred the old days.

No pussies then. We were an older student body, guys who had been in battle, and wouldn’t take any crap. We were writing about life and death, not fraternity drunks and panty raids, hoping to catch the eye of some editor looking for another Ernie Pyle. What’d you turn in today?

Piece on a Bronze Star winner caught stealing panties from Chi Omega.

Smart ass. He sucked on his Pepsi and tried again to light his pipe. Three matches over a dead bowl. He put the pipe down.

Mike Sullivan died yesterday. I ever told you about Mike Sullivan?

The Hollywood reporter?

One and the same. My class, ‘49. Three years in a Jap prison camp. Came out seventy-eight pounds.

Tell me.

He finished the Pepsi in two swallows, belched loudly, and smiled as if he had won the Medal of Honor.

Fraternity boy was shot dead on a Sunday afternoon outside one of the whorehouses in north Clarendon. He was banging on the door at the Chick Chick Shack, yelling he wanted nookie. Bessie, the owner, called out they were closed and to get the hell out of there. Kid busted a window with a rock and she shot him down. Big stink. His parents had money. Sullivan jumped on the story—wrote it in this room, right there in the corner—and the wire services picked up his stuff on Bessie, the kid, and his family. Two worlds and all that—and Mike rode the story for months, through the trial and all the way to a job in Hollywood.

And became a fucking gossip.

Guilty on both counts. But rich and famous.

Is that the same Chick Chick Shack that’s there now?

Sure. Bessie’s not there—she’s doing big time—but nothing else has changed.

There were four black whorehouses on two blocks in north Clarendon. I visited two of them several times every Friday and Saturday night with cab loads of fraternity boys. When I answered the call they were full of beer and feeling like John Wayne. They were gonna make a whore cry with pleasure and be so good they’d get it free. Maybe they’d try two or three women in a row. Or at the same time.

Cab drivers got a buck of every five they spent at Josie’s and the Chick Chick Shack. We waited around the corner for the call to come and get them. It never took very long—in my case, a few chapters of Melville under the dome light. Most of the time the boys were quieter going home. Some rode with their head on their knees, whimpering in their handkerchief. The houses paid at the end of each driver’s shift, on the honor system. We went by to collect after our last call. I’d never been inside the other places—Clara’s or Rumboogie—because they had no arrangement with the company. My boss at Veterans Cab said they catered mostly to the men at Delacotte Air Force Base, locals, and the knowing traveler. No kickbacks.

I had a plan. The possibility of a leg up. Until now, three months from a Master’s, the only prospects I had were with dailies in Greenville, Mississippi, and Elkhart, Indiana, covering City Hall and the police department, and writing obituaries. The small-town ramble wasn’t me. I wanted to write about desperate lives in big city apartments that stank of cigarettes, cat piss, and cabbage, and to peel the histories of Jane Does found slashed in vacant lots.

I thanked Dooley for the Sullivan story and told him what I intended to do. His face lit up. Go get it, he said.

Two days later, Wednesday, after laying out an outline and strategy and bouncing them off my wife Del to make them foolproof, I called Wayne Foxdotter, editor-in-chief. I told him I’d like to see him privately, away from the paper, and he asked me to stop by for a beer.

Wayne was also chairman of the campus daily’s advisory board and had convinced the faculty and Clarendon businessmen who were its members to award the column to me over four other staff writers. He was also a great editor, the kind of talent who finds your real lede buried on page three and puts together two paragraphs you’d separated by four pages. Now he was in law school, a dead-serious student who avoided Saturday football and most other temblors of undergraduate life in favor of history, world affairs, and criminal injustice. He was twenty-three but already a man; most of us were still aspiring.

As soon as I walked in, he handed me a foreign brew I’d never heard of. His place was spare and tidy, painted institutional green, with lots of Formica, throw rugs, and books on shelves of stacked boards and bricks. Karsh-type black-and-white portraits of Walter Lippman, FDR, and General George C. Marshall in dime store frames were the only art.

What’s up? he asked.

I took him through it. He began smiling early on. When I finished he pushed his glasses to the top of his head, rubbed his eyes, and sat back.

Risky, he said, but I like It. We’ll be doing something beside jocks, Greeks, gift announcements, and legislative appropriations. I can see an editorial to go with your piece, and I’d like to do that, if one piece is all you do. Even that will have repercussions—but that’s okay. The university and the whorehouse. Moral considerations. Exploitation of women. I like it. Yes.

He asked questions I couldn’t answer: Could I do a series? Who were the women? Where did they come from? Could I find any who would talk to me? Who ran the joints? How long before Sullivan had they been there?

Of course, he added, I won’t run even the one piece unless it’s done flat-out serious and very well. But if it is, I think we’ve got something. I’ll be out of town for the weekend. Can you show me something Tuesday?

I promised. He shook my hand. Wayne Foxdotter was not a man who in three days—or thirty years—would have finked out.

This could be very helpful to you getting started, he said as I got up to leave. I hope there’s no personal risk.

Nah, I said.

Del, of course, didn’t agree.

You can’t just walk into a situation like that without protection. Find some brute to go with you. I’ll be scared stiff till you’re home. I don’t want to get a call at three in the morning telling me that they just found my husband in an alley with his balls in his mouth.

We had married in August against the wishes of our parents. Without a bank account, we were scratching. When Del wasn’t in class, she tutored foreign students in English twenty hours a week and spent another fifteen hours stimulating three-year-olds at a pre-school. That all went toward the rent.

The rest of what we needed had to come from the cab. I drove ten hours on Wednesdays and did fifteen on Fridays and Saturdays. Nobody ever got rich hacking on a small-town university campus.

Which was why I had had to request special consideration from Addison Steele Scott, Clarendon’s great Shakespearean, whose Friday class began when I was due to climb into the cab. Scott was an oddity: his face resembled a failed clay bust its sculptor had squeezed in frustration. His eyes were set in two planes, and no two teeth left his jaw at the same angle. Wearing a thick scarf and black beret even in the suffocating humidity of a Clarendon August, he moved across campus in solitary dialogue, seeing and acknowledging no one. But in classes filled by his reputation with apostles, giant linemen, and the earnestly curious, he made the mysteries of Elizabethan English as immediate as the news. He roared Othello and made Nixon of Macbeth. Everyone was Mister or Miss, every student interpretation thoughtful, and you knew from the grapevine that your essay examinations would be returned with observations lengthier than your own.

I had gone to his office in high anxiety.

No problem at all, he said. How about meeting with me privately at 8 a.m. Fridays, right here? He must have read my surprise because he added, Scheduling conflicts give me the rare opportunity to explore the undergraduate mind at close hand—to keep in touch, as it were. It’ll be enlightening, I’m sure."

In the first three sessions he learned by pointed questioning why I was going into journalism, Del’s history and ours, and what I read for pleasure. I commented that the recent