Rock Island

by Bill Etem

have to say Dame Joan Collins - and Margaret Lee was in 5 Golden Dragons– I don’t think she’s now Dame Margaret Lee but I could be wrong – she was a big name in British and Italian films back in the day. I suppose that would really piss you off if some other British actress who you were more or less just as good as was elevated to the rank of a Dame, but they didn’t see fit to make you a Dame - you might even suspect there’s some money being passed under the table – like how did some oil-rich little desert nation with basically no population get the World Cup in soccer? And Rio is like 70% slums and 30% sophisticated world-class city, but it got the Olympics over Chicago. And the metro Chicagoland area is 40% sophisticated rich world-class city, 50% presentable working-class neighborhoods, and only 10% ugly vicious homicidal slums. How strange is that to think that Chicago, a city built on politicians putting their friends and relatives into cushy government jobs, a city built on the principal that you need to hand over some money under the table if you expect the government to help you out, couldn’t find a way to get the 2016 Summer Olympics. And if you check out Modern Drunkard Magazine, which can be pretty funny, you’ll learn that at the Great American Beer Fest you more or less buy the prize that they give you. You could brew a beer that taste like sh$!, but if you got lots of money to hand over to the judges then you’ll have no problem at the GABF. I mean I don’t know this for a fact or anything. That’s just the way Modern Drunkard Magazine paints the scene over at the GABF. And why would you immediately distrust everything in Modern Drunkard Magazine? Getting back to 5 Golden Dragons, a chain-smoking Klaus Kinski is in it - he was a real psycho by all accounts - and Dan Durea is in it – he was big in some 1950s film noir classics, and there’s George Raft, who was big in the 30s and 40s, and Sieghardt Rupp is in it. He was perhaps most famous for his role as Esteban Rojo, one of the villains in A Fistful of Dollars. That was that film where you had the evil Anglo-Saxon gangsters encamped on one side of the little town of San Miguel, and you had the evil Mexican banditos encamped down the street on the other side of San Miguel – it was The Baxters vs. the Rojos! – Anglo-Saxon Civilization vs. Latin Civilization – Protestants vs. Catholics - and you don’t want to get caught in the middle between those two warring factions. That was one of those spaghetti westerns where the Italians who made it took Anglo pseudonyms in the credits: Sergio Leonne was Bob Robertson, Ennio Morricone was Dan Savio, Gian Maria Volente was Johnny Wels. Anyway, Clint Eastwood comes along and greases all the Baxters after they insulted his horse, and he pretty much kills all of the Rojos as well, if memory serves. I once wrote book called Introduction to Dumb-Ass Theory. It began like this:

  ‘Various college professors, learned scholars, writers and philosophers, inside and outside of Academia, have been insisting for some time now, both inside and outside of university lecture halls, that you must be a dumb-ass if you believe in God. Some students applaud their zeal. Others are not amused whatsoever. Still other students have turned inwards and have begun to question the very existence of dumb-asses. Are dumb-asses like unicorns? Are they mythological creatures? Are they things which exist in name only? And even if dumb-asses do exist, can anyone conclusively prove that they exist? Such questions soon become oppressive in their inscrutability: even if one can prove that one or fifty or fifty million bona fide dumb-asses exist, out of world’s population of 7 billion, has one truly accomplished something newsworthy?

  `There are a few basics to go over. We have a Case 1 and we have a Case 2. Case 1. The Koran is trustworthy. You can trust the Koran in those verses where it says non-Muslims will burn in hell. So, if this is true, if Case 1 is valid, then a person is a dumb-ass who will soon spend eternity in the Islamic hell if he never converts to Islam. But if the Koran is a work of fiction, if God rejects Islam – we’re in Case 2 now so things change fast so pay attention – if Case 2 is true, Case 2 says the Koran is untrustworthy, Case 2 says the Koran is fiction – do you see how this works? Case 1 says the Koran is trustworthy; it is a work of nonfiction, Case 2 says the Koran is a work of fiction: it is untrustworthy, so if Case 2 is true, then you’re doing something intelligent, you’re not doing a dumb-ass thing, OK, when you refuse to convert to Islam, OK?

  ‘Let’s turn to R. K. G. Taylor, LL.D., Ph.D. Let’s turn to Chapter 9 of his much praised, and much maligned, imaginary children’s book, Classical Dumb-Ass Theory for Kids, pp. 892-8, to see how the distinguished professor explains things:

  “Well, lets get off the subject of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski, I’ve droned on long enough about how some authorities insist that you can can’t judge a man that chicks dig in the same way that you judge a man that chicks don’t dig - Clinton always reminded me a little of Christopher Walken, who first became a big star in The Deer-Hunter, and he was good in this movie called The Dogs of War and of course he was good in The Dead Zone and lots of other movies. So, kids, there was this Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud and he discovered the Id, the Ego and the Superego. Well the Id is like your most Basic Instinct - which was a movie you kids are far too young to learn about, anyway, for example, boys, say you’re a little older than you are now, like you’re in college, and you’re drinking beer with your buddies at a party, and then you look up and there’s this hot chick giving you the eye, and so you say to yourself ‘I want to get me some of that!’ In the Alain Delon film Le Gitan, also starring Marcel Bozzuffi, Renato Salvatoi, Paul Meurisse, the latter played a connoisseur / safe cracker. Meurisse had one of those faces, like Bogart’s, which exuded intelligence, or at least cunning. He was very good in Le Deuxieme Souffle. Anyway there’s a gangster named Gene Newman in Le Gitan, I forget his name in real life, but he’s only got one thing on his mind, all the time. Even when he’s getting shot up by the cops, and is lying in the middle of a street, dying, he still keeps an eye on the ladies, so his Id is rather prominent in that direction. Or say it is ten below zero outside on a winter’s day and you run outside in your pajamas to get the newspaper - and so you’re saying to yourself as you fetch the paper - ‘damn it’s cold out here! I wish I put some shoes on and I wish I put a coat on before I came out here in this Siberian ice hell to get the newspaper!’ So your Id is telling you to put some shoes on your feet when it’s ten degrees below zero outside - yes, that’s your Id that is telling you that stuff. You don’t have to be too smart to understand the stuff your Id is telling you. But you have to be smart to understand stuff that pertains to your Ego. Your Ego is your higher intellectual thought processes, like when you take two fingers on your hand and then take two more fingers to the two fingers you already got, and so you know by the magic of addition that you now got four fingers, or say you know that you have seven pockets - four in your pants and three in your coat - and in each pocket you have $50 then you intellect - your Ego - using the mathematical operation of multiplication - will tell you how much money you have altogether, without you having to do any counting. Recall in Fargo where Margie has to correct her cop partner who was slow to read the clues which were telling them they were looking for a car with dealer plates on it, or like when they were grilling that Native American ex-con and he was thinking hard how he was going to explain how he didn’t have any contact with the suspects when the phone records proved that the suspects had called his phone and proved that a conversation lasting several minutes was definitely made on his phone. Or like when a car dealer asks you if you want to get the undercoating for your new car, you have to use your brain to figure out if getting the undercoating is a good deal or if it is just a way for sleaze-ball auto dealers to make money off of chumps. Do you think the car might collapse in a pile of rust some day while you’re doing 75 mph on the freeway if you don’t get the undercoating? Why would you buy that brand of car if you think it might? So your Ego is your thinking ability - say you were one of those kidnappers in Fargo - if your Ego is working at all then you ought to be able to figure out a way to pick up the ransom money without getting half your face blown o
ff by a guy’s revolver, right? Or like when Margie was interviewing that one prostitute who was from Chaska – and Margie is asking her what the suspect that she slept with, played by Steve Buscemi, looked like, and all she could say was that he was ‘funny-looking’. You have to think hard to find the words to describe him, you have to really exercise your Ego, not your Id mind you but your Ego, because it is sort of hard to come up with a more detailed description of Steve Buscemi than just plain ‘funny looking’. I suppose you could say he is ‘interesting looking,’ or that ‘he looks like an impoverished or down-on-his-luck not to say dissolute 18th century Italian nobleman’ etc., etc. Anyway we’ve covered the Id (Basic Instincts) and the Ego (the Intellect), so now for the Superego. The Superego is the stuff that your mom and your dad taught you when you were a little kid. Say you’re no longer a baby, say you’re about two or three years old, well, when your mama or your papa