Further Adventures
Read Further Adventures Online
Authors: Jon Stephen Fink
A Novel
To Dawn and Lenny
October 11 1989
My Kitchen
18910 Pecan Street
Apt. 8
Mason New Mexico
To Who It May Concern—
I was The Green Ray. Now it can be told the Story which many tried to silence many refused to believe & many did not want to hear about. I believe that there are Contracts which prove this fact amid the papers of the late Mr. Howard Silverstein of Westchester New York. I do not know where those Papers could be filed today or even if they still exist but he was a V.I.P. and maybe all of them became donated to his Alma Mater back East. I am of the opinion he graduated from Yale. Or Princeton. One of those two or Harvard. If they are not there then I do not know what to tell you please take my word for it. My name was Ray Green.
To tell you the truth I think it was the main reason why the V.I.P.s of the Liberty Broadcasting Company gave me the job on account of my name. Many choices which change a person’s Life happen on the spurt of the moment on account of hunches & Mr. Silverstein had a hunch about me because of my name. Since he rose up from messenger boy to President of Liberty by playing such hunches & angles (you may remember it was Howard Silverstein who took a gamble on the popular appeal of Spiller’s High Energy Buckwheat Breakfast Flakes & the rest like they
say is breakfast food history) the other V.I.P.s took his word for it & lapped up the idea that I was the right man at the right time walking in. I will always be very thankful to him until the end of my Life which will be as soon as I finish writing this Note.
I would have told him my name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt if it was going to make a difference because the year was 1938 & good jobs were scarce on the ground especially jobs on the Air. Radio jobs being the ones cherished very high in New York i.e. besides the Stock Market which anyway did not feel itself since the famous Crash. It took a World War plus millions of deceased to puff it back up to its old level of success & there is a Moral there I believe. Nor I do not mean to sound unpatriotic but I claim in the heart of everything beneficial that is done you will find some kind of selfish Human motive & this makes a mockery of all decent human efforts. I know this is true because I was The Green Ray who defended the defenseless and punished the criminal—who fought to purge wrong & keep America strong. I held Life & Death in my fingers & stared Evil in the face so even if Ray Green went down in the final round The Green Ray lives on in 12 tough washable plastic statuettes available Free inside every single specially marked box of Spiller’s High Energy Buckwheat Breakfast Flakes. Ask Mom to buy some today!
I write this Note to inform you I am not a helpless victim of a Murder but I believe there are many rotten lousy people who will rejoice with vigor when they get the news of my Death. I write this Note to explain why I decided to finish my Life by my own hand.
I do not believe that Death can be worse than any of the other things I saw over the years but especially it can not be worse than the events of the last 3 Weeks & 4 Days. People run from Death every way they can by business or by pleasure or a combination a person can trick him
self & believe he can put enough Distance between his footprints and Death’s. Wake up in the morning and get out of bed vertical it is a trick of the body to make you forget how Life always has Death in it. You can not defy Gravity forever. Well I am not going to trick myself about this business anymore. I will call a spade a spade I will let the chips fall wherever they may. AMEN.
I am not going to hang myself since there are not any structures in my apartment strong enough to hold my weight. There is the exercise bar where I used to do my morning pull ups but it is not tall enough I would have to hang with my legs curled up which is a position I can not maintain for all the necessary duration.
Also I decided I am not going to swallow any overdose of pills because the only kind of Medicine I have in my bathroom is St. Joseph’s Aspirin for Children so easy and pleasant to take which does not upset my stomach. I believe I need to swallow about 30 bottles before St. Joseph’s gives me any lethal effect nor I do not think the drug store will sell me so many in a single purchase without some kind of official explanation.
So I decided I am going to make good use of the Snubnose .38 which my arch foe handed me on a silver platter in my glove compartment. Out of the 3 Methods I know blowing my brains out causes the most of a mess but I have to say SO WHAT for I also know Mrs. Orban will clean the place up when she comes in as usual on Thursday.
Now I run into Death’s arms with my eyes wide open. Ray Green died by a bullet from his own hands this is the true story. Amen. Furthermore
I please ask
you should add this Note into the phonus bolonus official FBI file certain persons want to palm off is the true picture of events. Officers of the Law will tell you evidence in my File says everything but it is not even 10%. Nor I am not afraid to spell out the facts I will give you full descriptions I hope you do not flinch. My words should fall on their necks like a Heavy Ax. I sincerely hope that
somebody exactly as lousy rotten as them but with a different Motive & Desire (namely JUSTICE) will get the last son of a bitch standing BUT GOOD!
I will not go on about this but I want to die by myself. Most of my Life that is the way I lived. Most of my days were very quiet except for the ones between September 12 1938 & March 5 1946. Plus the last 3½ Weeks. The first day I was The Green Ray before the American audience was a carbon copy of the day that certain events forced me out of Retirement. The weather & everything. This is a fact you can look up.
I am a little jumpy at the moment since I do not know what that scraping noise outside my window is. Wait. I am going to go check on it.
No it was not who I expect here it was only the loose cover coming off my air conditioner unit which aggravates me something terrible since it is brand new from Sears and not cheap merchandise either.
Here are the facts of September 12 1938. The first thing that Mr. Silverstein ordered me was nobody NO MATTER WHO is allowed to know the True Identity of The Green Ray. “Keep it under your arm Pieface.” Secret from my family even. I promised him I would do it until my dying days but he replied for the term of my Contract was good enough. Off the record he advised me this way—if anybody else found out who was
really The Green Ray i.e. this skinny Jewish kid from Philadelphia who was bald on top by the unfair age of 22 then said Jewish kid etc. would find himself selling matches on a street corner pretty darn pronto. Public knowledge of my identity interferes with the mission of The Green Ray it hampers my ability to do anonymous unrewarded Good.
I had to agree with Mr. Silverstein who also spoke on behalf of Mr. P. K. Spiller who owned Spiller’s Fine Foods Incorporated the makers of Spiller’s High Energy Buckwheat Breakfast Flakes the sponsor of our show. I even asked Mr. Silverstein if I should change my name Ray Green being a dead giveaway in spite it was a Fateful Coincidence but he made back a good point that such a obvious move would arouse suspicion in the public mind. The newspapers for instance Walter Winchell could get ahold of it then BOOM curtains.
Of course the Producer Mr. Argyll knew of my identity and the Engineer Mr. Burrows also his Assistant Leon Kern. Other persons who became connected to the show knew who I was & I mentioned this fact to Mr. Silverstein but he responded I could relax about it these individuals are hand-picked and paid very high for loyalty we could count on their Honor to keep quiet.
My Life before September 12 1938 was dark. My Life from then until March 5 1946 was light. I had a strong Voice for a man of my frame which fact Leon Kern made a remark on this way—“He’s all sticks & bones but with his voice who needs the echo chamber!” After that it was Leon’s job to remind me I should keep back from the microphones even farther back than anybody else did in radio history.
In that studio I came to Life like I never did before I felt like I was just as live as the electric wires that carried my voice out of there & up into the Air & down into living rooms all across America. And when I walked out of the Liberty Building after our first Episode I strolled around very light in my head. I heard a bunch of boys & girls talking about The Green Ray in front of a drug store. A icy wind was
slamming across Broadway but I walked right into it with my overcoat wide open. I was invincible. Also anonymous & above rewards but I was walking with a secret inside me my Secret Identity. I knew who I was & what I did plus I knew what a good thing nobody else knew me even if they did not realize how their ignorance was protecting them.
My whole Life changed. It was light all over.
The bright light of my Life faded almost all the way out in 1946 & when I came to again I was sitting in my kitchenette 43 Years later in my apartment on Pecan St. in Mason New Mexico. I had my pot of water boiling waiting for me to drop my onion in it then
blooey!
A blackout! All the electricity gone to Hell in a flash nor not just my apartment but this whole side of town.
I sat in my dark kitchenette for a few Minutes I waited for the Authorities to turn the juice back on. But the blackout kept going so I left my onion in the pot & went into my bedroom to sit not sleep. I waited 2 Hours & still no Electricity. A blackout it quivers very uncertain. In the middle of the dark it teases you by the promise if you wait eventually your Life will return to Light & Power. With different people the hope of things getting back to Normal takes different times to fade out. My hope faded out after 2 Hours and 10 Minutes which I believe is somewhat longer than the National Average.
One minute your Life is Normal—you have light & air conditioning & the T.V. with a baseball game playing on it maybe & a person has plans—to sit down & be comfortable with a boiled onion for instance & a can of beer he will spend a couple hours rooting for the winner. And next minute it is gone! Silence is everywhere. The game is playing somewhere or maybe it is not. Maybe it has been called on account of
a Meteor destroying the field or a Anarchist invasion. All of a sudden anything you can think of is possible. The dark conceals a person from the World and it conceals the World from a person. So a person can stew or a person can change his plans.
I did not stew. I left my apartment I walked around the neighborhood. The dark was Everywhere and even though by my watch it was only 9:00
P.M.
it could have been any Time it could have been the Middle Ages.
I believe it was the silhouettes by the fences & the ones running back & forth behind the Elementary School that gave me this particular idea. Ring Around The Rosy I believe was not a innocent child game always but was in the beginning of it a game they played to take away the terrors of the Black Plague. The
ashes
in the song meant the ashes of burned corpses I believe.
I heard children shouting over there in the playground and I followed the sound of their voices because I could not hear the exact words which they shouted i.e. the Purpose. I could not tell about the words they called out but I felt they were not calling them in Terror. It was playing. You know those kiddies hate like Hell to be in School Monday to Friday but now they were not allowed to be there so they just flocked in. Gangs of them & I believe that fact has a Moral in it about the way people act in unpredictable ways when the Circumstances change.
The blackout changed all of the Circumstances all right the Normal world took a vacation. My side of town was gone for sure and for all I knew so was the rest. The state of New Mexico. The whole Country. If it was not for the many transistor Radios in Mason which brought news of the Emergency everybody would have thought it was The Finale of one thing and Episode 1 of something else. But the Emergency was not
the condition of that 100,000 Volt transformer etc. it was the condition which surfaced & sank then surfaced & sank again in everybody’s Mind i.e. something in the world was different now & nobody knew for sure if it was all going to be the same again when the Sun came up. The Balance of the World went in this minute it was too dark for this time of Night.
I believe my step must sound like it has a Purpose because the kids ran away when they heard me walk over. Only a couple of them did not run away maybe they did not hear me since their Purpose was stronger than mine. They were a boy & a girl in the shadows there leaning between the bungalows. “Where’s my kiss honeybun?” the boy said & I thought it was not dirty it was beautiful. I doubt it they had much practice at kissing etc. like Adam & Eve on the first moment of their Romance.
They made the dark gentle around them there I thought & I thought if it was safe enough for them to show their Love outside then the World was safer because it had their kissing in it. I am guessing about this. Maybe they were not a boy & a girl. Maybe they were short old people but so what is the Difference. I walked away from there & I imagined in my Mind what it felt like to say “Where’s my kiss honeybun?” & how it felt to hear somebody ask me Likewise.
In this minute my feet fainted in my shoes. When I looked around I did not see any local Landmark I did not recognize where I was. But that was beside the fact of what I did recognize. It is a remarkable thing how a person can not see inside the innocent things of this world the seeds of Doom. They are in everything like dust is in the Air like Death is in Life. No matter what a person does he opens the door to worldly Doom. I think this is remarkable how a normal person will ignore all of the Warnings!
The little stroll was the only time I went over 2 Blocks from my apartment since January. And that was only down to the drug store for
the baby aspirins. But look what I did I wandered all the way over to the East 8th which is a lousy rotten part of Mason. So I turn around & walk a Block this way then I turn around & go the Opposite and all the time I am sniffing the Atmosphere like a dumb animal so I can zero in on the odors of the bakery on Rose Ave. which I can follow back to the right Neighborhood. All of a sudden it hits me the ovens in Bea’s Bakery are Electric so they are knocked out so I am in misery.