#437 Dee- Jerome Charyn

#437 Dee- Jerome Charyn

Dee grew up as a princess, the daughter of a west side mogul. But that wasn’t her world, she was drawn uncontrollably to the Hospital her father sponsored that housed all manner of odd and wonderful people.

“Sommerset had to pull her screaming out of the hospital’s halls. The sickly faces had frightened her, yet she dreamt of touching the wild patches of hair that belonged to these old men. There wasn’t one face as bewildering or as beautiful along Central Park West, where she lived in a monstrous cave of fourteen rooms at the Sam Remo.”

She eschewed her silver spoon life and became a freak herself. “She was the waif with cropped hair who lived in a pauper’s castle.” She spent her life photographing circus freaks and monstrosities like her good friend Eddie, an eight-foot man known as the Jewish Giant. After many years and many accolades she was stricken with guilt for exploiting her friends, but to Eddie, she was a muse. Without her, he could no longer write poetry.

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

#416 Marla- Jerome Charyn

Marla recently found out her sister, long since removed from her life, was still alive. She had been sent away by her family because of some disturbing tendencies and never spoke of her again. Now with her father dead, she found Irene and has welcomed her back to her family’s 15-room apartment on Central Park West.

As an attorney, Marla has gained a reputation as a viscous opponent, and outside the courtroom, she and her two shadowy body men, she is known as an old-school Bronx enforcer.

“Marla shouldn’t have been so cruel. She lived a monstrous life, shielding murderers and swindlers, defying prosecutors and ripping out the threads of their elaborate tales.”

Now with her sister in her life, and the law practice she has always fought for, she is at the height of her power, but at what cost? She defends the city’s worst criminals, and when one of them has eyes on her sister, perhaps the chickens have come home to roost. It was her after all that kept them out of jail.

“She was the criminal, not Marcellus Bloom. Marla had created the monster, allowed him to flourish. He should have been locked away a long time ago, with Marla in the next cell.”

She also, got her sister out of her institution living. Irene also had criminal tendencies. It’s hard to see who to root for in some of thee stories, and I’m not sure we’re supposed to feel good about any of them. The Mother is shallow, and will think good of anyone as long as they give her presents, Marla is a mob boss type amoral criminal attorney, Irene is a psychopath. I don’t suppose there is any hope for the children if these are the three role models.

What makes for a lousy family sometimes makes for a good story at least.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#389 Little Sister- Jerome Charyn

#389 Little Sister- Jerome Charyn

Another story about Mortimer Silk, the arbitrage king of Wall st. and his daughter Marl, with her silver spoon, only now enters the younger sister. She was an aberrant child, and suddenly disappeared when Marla was five, never to be seen, or talked about for as long as her father was alive. Whenever she asked about her sister, they would all pretend she was crazy and say that she never existed.

She did exists, however, and Marla discovered that she was sent to a mental facility for being violent and unstable. It turns out that Mortimer hid her away and planned for that arrangement to continue in perpetuity even beyond the power of Marla’s family council status and executor of his will. She still finds a way to see her sister, now 37, but is awash in layers of lies.

We already saw the underbelly of the Silk family business, but this is dark stuff. Secrets, and hidden agendas fuel this story as we try to suss out the truth. Who exactly was the wolf raised by humans and who was being protected by whom. Crazy story.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#368 Silk & Silk- Jerome Charyn

#368 Silk & Silk- Jerome Charyn

Marla was the daughter of Mortimer Silk, a rich real-estate man from the Bronx. She was smart, independent, and after graduating from Columbia Law, joined her fathers firm. “Silks defend Silks.”

Mortimer was a corrupt, selfish, tough-nosed, philandering, criminal, with loose morals. Like Father, like Daughter.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#355 The Cat Lady’s Kiss- Jerome Charyn

#355 The Cat Lady’s Kiss- Jerome Charyn

I appreciate the attempt at fantasy and originality in this story, but I think it falls a bit short. The style is inconsistent and jagged. What starts out as a straight forward story about a shy, troubled woman caught in a patriarchal battle for her love, morphs into a story more befitting a fairy tale (kind of).

Angela is a Latina woman who has never had a real relationship with a man. Her mother was crazy, her father disturbed, and she ended in a juvenile detention center. When she comes out, she and a co-worker begin seeing each other, but a local gangster has his eye on her and sends him to the hospital. Then, kind of out of nowhere, the writing turns into something else:

“But she didn’t understand Bronx mountain lore. No woman, descended from the Dukagjinis or not, could demand a kiss from Lord Leke, the baba of the Bronx. It was Leke’s right to appear in a woman’s bedroom and ravish her, even with a husband at her side—it brought luck and long life to copulate with their lord, and husbands often delivered their own wives…etc.”

Then it kind of alternates back and forth between realism and fantasy. Perhaps he’s illustrating Angela’s unsound mind, but if he is, it’s a bit unclear. I absolutely love using fantasy, or skewed styles in a real setting. However, if you do, it has to be fully used…all or nothing. Here we are left in a no-man’s land of styles.

Rating: 6-8-5-5 Total= 24

#325 Archy and Mehitabel- Jerome Charyn

#325 Archy and Mehitabel- Jerome Charyn

Archy and Mehitable was an old cartoon written by Don Marquis and appeared regularly in the Evening Sun daily newspaper. They are a poetry writing cockroach and alley cat duo always on their own adventures. Jerome and Merle are such a pair, at least in Merle’s mind.

She was a brilliantly talented singer and avid teenage reader, but was also a bit of a shut it.  Her “liquid imagination” would often meld the world of literature and reality as she often referenced William Blake, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, etc.

“Her stories and poems were chiseled dreams from her days and nights in a madhouse.”

She liked Jerome, thought of his as her little cockroach, and allowed him into the sanctuary of her west-side home. Her parents, leery of rumors and bad reputation in their high culture clique liked Jerome immediately because of his humbleness and his own talents.

“I went to Music and Art [school] and looked like J.D. Salinger. That was enough of a resume.”

All the world’s a stage, so says Shakespeare—I guess that makes us all characters. Charyn certainly has found that line between genuine New York characters and fictional story telling. I don’t even want to try to figure out where that is.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#304 Adonis- Jerome Charyn

There is nothing quite like New York City. You don’t have to be rich, you just have to be interesting. You hang around long enough and you find yourself woven in the fabric of some crazy world; everybody is connected.

A young high school boy, a poor talented artist, with a family beaten down by war and misfortune is snatched up by a modeling impresario, Rosenzweig, aka-Dracula. This blood sucker has taken many young beautiful models and made them rich, but at what cost?

“I’d lost my belief in Van Gogh’s missing ear—it seemed like madness, not the mystery of great art.”

He finds himself in an intoxicating world of artists, mobsters, scene-makers. But like any intoxicant, too much is poison. Even with a box of cash under your bed, free meals and fancy parties, life gets complicated.  This story is half about the boy, and half about New York, a divided city between the old tradition and the new ethnic underworld:

“We belonged to that clan of West Siders who never wore watch fobs or attended debutante balls. We had galas for indigent artists.”

 Notable Passage: “I had to ride the local in and out of the Bronx. Each stop was a kind of purgatory.”

Rating: 9-9-8-8 Total= 34

#283 Lorelei- Jerome Charyn

#283 Lorelei- Jerome Charyn

Howell was a con-man, a grifter, a chiseler. He went from small town to small town taking advantage of rich widows. But he always came back to the Bronx where he grew up a poor child of a poor family. He never stole the big money and never hit it big, even as a kid watching Yankees games from afar up the hill, he was always “binoculars away” from what he wanted.

So, now in his fifties, tired of the con, he comes back to live in the diminished Grand Concourse “Lorelei” where he was once the superintendent’s son. To his surprise the love of his youth, the debutante and daughter of the real estate king of the Bronx was still living there, unmarried and waiting for him.

Naomi is a cross between Scarlett O’Hara and Miss Havisham (the old jilted spinster from Great Expectations). She was false, tragic, despicable and irreversibly damaged; and in a way Howell only saw now, more of a chiseler than even himself.

“Howell was in misery. She’d robbed him of whatever thunder he had left.”

I liked this story at the start, I thought the set up was great and built a foundation for something rich and tragic and very dramatic. Instead it kind of fell off the rails and stopped short. I would have liked to see this story as novella.

Notable Passage: “The white rose is a symbol of love as everlasting war.”

Rating: 8-9-6-7 Total= 30