Sunday, August 17, 2003 5:38 PM Joe Coluccio

My Divine Comedia - Canto One or so.

"What am I doing here?" a young man in dark gray striped Giorgio Armani with red power tie over bleached white shirt tapped loudly on the pure white radiant table.

A golden name plate announced Leonardo. The old guy standing behind sandboarding his fingers. Fine Firenzen eyes, face like red chalk, long white hair that curled wildly into his beard. He was wearing a white golf shirt with a koala bear emblem, tan slacks and brown shoes with high gloss tassels. "I believe you were hit by the 56C as you ill advisedly tried to cross rush hour traffic at Fourth and Grant."

"You nitwit, that wasn't me. It was the guy next to me. I just bent over to pick-up the quarter that he dropped. He ran out into the traffic!"

The old man shrugged his shoulders. "Heart attack then."

"It most certainly was not a heart attack! I just had a check up. My cholesterol is way down and my veins and arteries are, to quote Doctor Hennessey 'supple and clear as a baby's'."

"Brain tumor?"

"Impossible, just got a clean chart on a CAT scan!"

"Cancer?"

"It was none of those. I'm as healthy as a horse. Can't you just admit you made a mistake? Just send me back down the escalator."

"I invented that you know?"

"What?"

"The escalator! Before I came on board you had to climb a really long set of steps."

"Swell! What about me? I have a staff meeting at one, and a proposal due at five. Nothing'll get done if I don't get back!"

"You ever hear of a man called Miyamoto Musashi. Wrote Go Rin No Sho. The Book of Five Rings?"

"No!"

"He says that the samurai should always be ready for death."

"So?"

"Well, one of the things you do to prepare is to always have your life in order."

"Sounds great but I'm not a Samurai! Besides, you duffuses mucked everything up! You should have taken the guy next to me. A whole Port Authority Transit Bus smacked into him. What about him?"

Leonardo flips through an account book that rests on a table next to his throne. "Oh, you'll be glad to know that he's fine. Slipped under the wheels and then slid into the storm sewer. Had a terrible smell of decaying vegetation about him in the ambulance, but he's been released from the hospital with some minor contusions. Says he has a whole new lease on life." The old man looked at him beatifically.

"What? Is that supposed to make me happy?"

"No, I guess not. From the looks of things his wife isn't celebrating either."

"This isn't fair! I wasn't bothering anyone. Just a taking a quiet minute on the street for a smoke and POW, you grab the wrong guy."

Leonardo gives a look of sympathy that really says nothing.

"Look, if you don't have the authority to send me back, I want to talk to your boss?"

"Now that might be a mistake. I'd really advise against it."

"What's the matter? Afraid you'll get busted for incompetence?"

Leonardo laughs pleasantly "No, no not at all. See, my boss does the judgin'"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Did you ever read the Divine Comedy?"

"No."

"Dante?"

"What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"Hhhm must have had an American education You are a Christian?"

"Even more than that, I'm Catholic!"

Leonardo gestures with his hands in a full circle sweep, "Well? Midway twixt this life and the next? The pearly gates and all that? You finally get weighed on the scales of universal justice?"

Something akin to hidden knowledge broached appears in the knit brows of the man. "The Pearly Gates? Like in all those lawyer jokes? I thought St. Peter was at the Pearly Gates."

"And so he is, so he is, but first you get the tour from me. Kind of an orientation to your peculiar inchoate beliefs."

"Look, whatever your name is..."

"Leonardo from Vinci, a small town in what is presently called Italy."

"Sure, look, Leo, this tour…ah …do you think you could…you know…get me close to the outside…help me over the wall…let me find my way back to the bus stop?"

"Out of the question, Waldo…"

"Shhhhh! Hey…don't say my name so loud, it's embarrassing. Everyone calls me Skippy."

"Skippy, I'm afraid that death is relatively irrevocable."

"How about that going back as a newborn stuff. There's the ticket! You could reincarnate me."

"Are you sure you're Christian?"

"Hindu," pauses as tight thought lines appear on his forehead, "Moslem. I mean, if that helps."

"It would help me immensely. I'd love to have Suleiman set you up with a dozen vestal virgins but you were born in the western tradition and rules, my dear, Skip, is rules."

"Okay, but I know my rights! I have the God given duty to try to escape."

"This isn't Stalag 13. I will, however, let you pick the first stop on our voyage."

"Vegas! I always wanted to go to Vegas!"

"Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, dreary and unimaginative as they are, those are the choices."

"Is there a casino with a good floor show in Hell?"

"Senior Skippy! Andiamo!"

Monday, August 11, 2003 7:22:00 PM

De gustibus non est disputandum!

Yesterday at the company picnic, held south of Pittsburgh in Washington County in the park environs of the, as the sales brochures proclaim, largest swimming pool in the region everyone praised the hot dogs. And then! We found that not only were they not Hebrew National with the fine spices, or Nathan's redolent of turn of the century Coney Island Hype, nor Kahn's the wiener the world awaited, not fat kids skinny kids Armour, not even those stuffed by hand by a little man at the village two miles further on down Route 40 who's whole life and passion has been given to the development of the perfect dog.

Nope!

These my sweltering Ball Park Fiends were Turkey Dogs. Quelle horreur!

It did get me to thinking.

Of the fact that I, by far, prefer a caffeine free diet cola to one loaded with straight syrup. That for a time I bought wine by the box. That the first pipe tobacco that I loved was called Cherry Blend. That I started to drink Postem in a fit of health and actually began to prefer it to coffee, but most of all I thought of my old man and the water collected from the source of all the world's deep well of water, lovingly bottled from a rusted pipe hidden behind vegetation in a rock formation somewhere between Harmarville and Dorseyville.

After the laborious trip to the holy fount in our Root Beer and White, Wood Trimmed, Rambler Station Wagon he would reverently place a half gallon glass jug sweating from the coolness of the clear ichor within into the fridge. Swing the door closed and look at us in a kind of spiritual daze and explain to me and my brother, who sat at the kitchen table open to all lore and baloney, that here was the finest water in the world! Nay, the universe! Restorative and sweet! Ponce De Leon had missed this fountain by a thousand miles or more.

Thereafter, he would pour water into a glass from the sacred vessel, drink deeply, smack his lips and proclaim loudly for all the world to witness, "Man! Now that is water!" Then look sadly at the dwindling supply figuring the days until he would have to head north and west into the wild Pennsylvania forest for a refill.

I admit it. It was cruel! But one summer Sunday morning when we spotted less than an inch left in the bottle, my brother and I, with a daring born of weeks of lip smacking and water praising, emptied the small portion left and profaned the container by filling it about one eighth full with less than perfectly filtered, pumped from the Allegheny to a water tower and distributed to the whole neighborhood, tap water.

You should know that my father was not an easy man. He taught me to drive largely by swinging his fist into my meaty shoulder with every unpardonable traffic error that I committed. People wonder now why I flinch when I mistakenly make a turn without properly signaling, or run a yellow light, or back improperly into a parking space. Just the way I was trained. Pow! So although we thought that gag was a funny one, we also felt grave trepidation when the old man swung open the refrigerator door later that morning.

He grabbed the glass jug, swirled the water around until it cylcloned up the side of the bottle. Took a glass from the cupboard, poured the rapidly swirling water into the frost patterned drinking glass, lifted it to his mouth and drank long and deep. My brother and I were still as squirrels, expecting a storm, ready to flee the flailing fists. The outburst came loud and clear. There are people in Cleveland who swear they heard it.

"Man!" he sang at the top of his lungs, "Now that is water!"

And we began to howl! Tears on our faces, unable to breathe, lay down on the floor and thumped loudly and laughed for everything that we were worth. The old man, more curious than angry, was able after a time to calm us down. "What the hell is so funny?" Empty glass in his hand.

"Man," we explained, "that was tap water!"

I'll give him this. Not one dark cloud formed in his face, not one fist curled. He just began to laugh.

We filled that jug from the kitchen sink faucet for the rest of the summer.