The Literary Review
American Legion Chili Challenge
On Groundhog Day the people of Potawatomi Rapids
come out of hibernation for the annual chili festival,
lured by spice and meat and tomato sauce
the way shit and honey draw flies.
Kiwanis, Elks, Eagles, Rotary Club
and First Responders prepare their secret recipes,
some mild and meaty, others fire-alarm hot,
chilis and peppers, tomatoes, onions
in different proportions, chili powder, paprika, cumin.
Donations paid, votes cast.
Faithful as Punxsutawney Phil himself,
Brock always attended, drank too much beer,
joked about his farts, then crossed off
the date on his wall calendar
the way his old man had done,
counting down the days to spring training,
when his beloved Tigers would take the field.
But Brock won’t be joining in this year.
Last month, a high school classmate,
no longer the team captain he once had been,
made the mistake of trying to shovel
his drive after a big snow.
Brock’s blasted heart reduced the class roster
by one yet again. Fewer and fewer of them all the time.
I was almost sorry I missed our fiftieth reunion
the year before, when the pandemic
began picking off the locals like Mickey Lolich
picking off runners trying to steal second.
- Charles Rammelkamp
Commencement
“I knew her at Forest Park High,”
Ron, the Jewish guy who ran the drycleaning shop
told me when I came in for my shirts.
“She was Ellen Cohen then, class of ’fifty-nine.
I remember she was in the co-ed choir.”
In another month it’d be the twenty-first century.
I was on my way home from work,
always loved shooting the breeze with Ron.
There’d been a story about Mama Cass Elliot
in the local newspaper, dead a quarter century.
“Just two weeks before she graduated,
she went off to New York to seek her fortune.
She wanted to be an actress.
Her mother worked at Social Security headquarters,
in Woodlawn. Needless to say she disapproved.”
Ron rang me up at the register.
I handed him a bill, he gave me change.
I had stuff to do, ready to leave,
but Ron had memories to spill,
a life-long Baltimorean.
“Took her years, but she made it big.
Absolutely hated being called ‘Mama Cass,’
but that’s where she made her mark,
even though her career had its ups and downs
after the Mamas and the Papas broke up.
“Mayor Schaefer always knew an angle when he saw it,
declared August 13, 1973 “Cass Elliot Day,”
had a parade and everything, marching bands,
clowns, politicians, antique cars,
Cass and her mom in a Cadillac limousine.
“They ended up downtown at Hopkins Plaza,
Willie Don handing her the Forest Park diploma,
fourteen years late, along with a key to city.”
Ron sighed. “Cass’d be dead less than a year later,
heart failure, in her Mayfair apartment, London.
“Rumor is she choked to death on a ham sandwich.”
- Charles Rammelkamp
My brother’s best friend’s uncle told me
during the Kiddush luncheon
at our sister’s Bat Mitzvah service,
both of us holding paper plates with kugel, salad, a bagel,
he’d been to Harbin, in a remote Chinese province,
south of Siberia, north of North Korea,
the average temperature twenty-two below zero.
The city’d been built by Jews
around the turn of the 20th century,
after the Chinese okayed the Trans-Siberian Railroad
to go through Manchuria.
After the 1905 pogroms in Odessa,
Jews had flocked to Harbin.
At its peak, 20,000 Jews lived there.
Then came the 1917 Russian Revolution,
and the anti-Semitic White Russians moved in.
They and the Japanese extorted, confiscated,
kidnapped and murdered: the usual story.
Then by 1949 the Maoists controlled Harbin,
stripped the businesses and property
of the thousand or so Jews still there.
The last Jewish family left in 1962.
Only Hannah Agre remained,
the crazy-old-lady who refused to leave,
living in a tiny room in the Old Synagogue.
That’s where the best friend’s uncle’s story came in.
He happened to pass through on business
just the year before. This was 1984,
the year of Orwell. He met Agre,
seventy-four at the time,
miserable in her little room,
huddled on a wooden chair.
Her only other possessions a brass bed,
a blackened kettle, a worn cabinet.
“Give me death,” she said in Russian.
The uncle knew a little of the language.
“Dress me in a shroud. I am old,
sick as a dog.”
She did die the next year.
A jaw-dropping story. But since then?
A whole tourist industry’s sprung up,
“Jewish Heritage sites,” meant to rake in the dough:
Tours of the “largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East,”
a Jewish museum in a reconstructed synagogue,
lifesize plaster Jews seated at typewriters,
holding knitting needles, playing the piano,
photographs of “real Jewish industrialists”
who “brought about numerous economic miracles”
to Harbin – a sugar refinery, a candy factory, a brewery.
Nothing about why they were gone.
I wonder if the best friend’s uncle ever returned.
I know I have no desire to go there. Ever.
- Charles Rammelkamp
Getting Away with Murder
When I saw the 15th century illustration,
King Chilperic of 6th century Neustria
strangling his wife, Galswintha,
older sister of Brunhild,
the prototype of Wagner’s heroine
in the epic opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen,
I wondered, though he was never punished,
if he really did get away with murder, after all,
remembered a thousand years later for the deed.
In the painting, the king holds both ends
of a scarf around Galswintha’s neck.
Jealous of his older brother Sigibert
for his marriage to Brunhild,
Chilperic, who’d sent first wife away
to a convent in Rouen years before,
asked King Athanagild for his daughter’s hand,
offering the entire southern third of his kingdom
to Galswintha for a morgengabe,
the husband’s gift to his bride
after consummating the marriage on the wedding night.
An offer like that?
How could Athanagild refuse the Frankish king?
But just a year into their marriage,
Galswintha caught Chilperic in bed
with his favorite slave girl.
Outraged, Galswintha threatened to go back home.
Shortly after, she was found dead in her bed,
strangled in her sleep.
True, Brunhild demanded her husband
declare war on his younger brother,
but Chilperic never even attempted
to find his wife’s murderer,
as good as a confession.
- Charles Rammelkamp
Ballaboosta
Bubbe always said her mama was an earner,
not a learner, when we asked about her business.
What was I when her mother died? Five? Six?
She supported the family
while Bubbe’s Abba studied Torah.
That’s all I knew about her jazz age career
in New York City. “She’d come to America
from a shtetl near Pinsk in Belarus.
“She had a really good head for math,”
Bubbe remembered, “and she didn’t take crap
from anyone. She kept scrupulous books.”
But what did she do?
“It was the beginning of Prohibition,”
Bubbe recalled. “Bootlegging had exploded
like you wouldn’t believe, money
flowing like a river through the underworld.
A Mister Montana set Mama up in business
across the street from the Columbia University library;
it was a great location.”
“So she could study, too?”
“It was a great location,” Bubbe repeated. “Upper West Side.
Members of the Algonquin Round Table were regulars,
so were Walter Winchell and Harold Ross.
None of these machers would have been caught dead
going to a working-class saloon.
Mama ran a glamorous place.”
“She ran a speakeasy?”
“Yes, that’s one word for it,”
Bubbe nodded, evasive.
Then she changed the subject.
Later, when I heard the term
“houses of ill-repute,”
I connected the dots.
- Charles Rammelkamp
Twin
“What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?…If you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die, a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am?” – Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
Not that we saw much of each other
after we’d left home at eighteen,
me to college, Bob to his destiny,
but we were always in touch, by mail,
and later, phone calls and e-mail.
The only times we actually saw each other
in the final two decades of his life:
1994, at our father’s funeral,
back home in Potawatomi Rapids,
scene of our childhood and growing-up;
2005, at our older brother’s, in Albuquerque;
2012, at our mother’s, in Potawatomi Rapids,
and finally, in 2013, two years before he died,
in LA, where he lived, when he got the diagnosis:
Stage four lung cancer, the first of many
chemotherapy treatments about to start.
My daughter and I went out to visit him.
The fourth act in a five-act play.
The print was so small on my cellphone,
I read the word audience as violence.
- Charles Rammelkamp