By Catherine Swarmy

Honestly, I don’t know why everyone keeps saying that America is in the grips of an economic crisis — I’m richer now than I have ever been!  Yes, I have been known to lay a little green down, and I must confess, I always have come up a big winner.  See, I think you just have to know the right people.  Like that Bernard Madoff fellow.  I met him a couple of years ago on my MySpace page, and we really hit it off, if you know what I mean.  I mean, he was a happily married man, but apparently that ring can’t choke off the old Swarmy charm. I gave him fourteen hundred dollars and he turned around and turned it into 14 million.  Financial genius.  I don’t know what these other people are complaining about.  Tough luck, Charlie, huh?

I know what you’re thinking, Catherine fourteen million is chicken feed — it’s certainly not rich, per se.  Well, you are right.  After my initial success with Bernard Madoff,  I thought, you know what, this investing is a snap, why do I need this other guy pulling the strings?  The answer was, I don’t.  Using my keen powers of knowing what’s “in” and what’s “out”, I deduced that the thirties were due to make a grand return, so I invested my money in “Talkies”, Jell-O, and Hoovervilles.

And wouldn’t you know it, my Hooverville futures shot through the roof late last year!  I hate to toot my own horn, but I think that I may never have to work ever again.  I know, what a relief, right?  I’m thinking of investing in mass graves next.  What do you think?

By Catherine Swarmy

Well, I don’t know what it was, but I found myself in the Greenwich Village in May of Ought-Seven looking for this Arab fellow I bought this lamp from in 1967.  Before you start on a tear and rush off to your desk and drop pen to paper, no, that lamp in question was not one of those with a genie in it.  When I bought it for twenty-four dollars in 1967, the lamp merchant assured me that my purchase was to have a lifetime guarantee.  Well, here it was not forty years later and the lamp was as dead as a damn dog.  Yes, yes, I had tugged the lamp with me as I relocated from New York to Serbia to France to California and back to New York.  And yes, you are not mistaken, with this is the same lamp I hit Alan Alda, the actor, with square over the mellon.  You call that an accurate portrayal of George Plimpton?  Well, I do not! Nor do I appreciate the grope, thank you, sir.

Oh, but I can hear you mutter under your garlic breath, “Catherine Swarmy, you have mistreated this lamp for decades, surely its degradation is your cross to bear.”  This is where your are wrong, and you should shut your mouth because you are stupid and stupid people should just shut the hell up.  It does not matter how many rings of hellfire this lamp had passed through, I still had the receipt, I still had my guarantee, and I intended to get the lamp replaced.  Or my money back!  Otherwise, we live in a society without rules rich people can enforce on others.  And if that happens, just put a gun in your mouth and suck it.

Only, get this, I hadn’t been down there in probably thirty years, and I must confess,  I was more than a pinch lost.  Not a block from where Christopher, Greenwich and Sixth Avenue intersect was, I had in my mind, was where this swarthy semitic charlatan turned his faulty wares into crisp cool American cabbage.  Once I stepped out the taxi cab I was not sure.  I mean, the whole neighborhood was different.  People lining the sidewalks eating breakfast in the afternoon.  The afternoon?

Obviously, I thought, I was in the wrong neighboorhood.  I had stepped out in a working class neighborhood where all discernible demographics worked “swing shift”, and two in the afternoon was their nine am.  That had to be it, I was in…oh, what was it called…Queens.  Well, I tried to stop the driver before he peeled off, but I was out of luck.  He may have been in a rush to his cave to take in a shower.  I would hope.  I dropped the lamp down on a vacant table with a notable “clump”, and you would not believe, all these breakfast on the middle of the god damned afternoon brats swung their heads around with no haste and great displeasure, mouths agape with eggs and toast, as if I had set off a god damned grenade in church.  

“Christ, you’re eating breakfast on the street,” I hissed under my breath.

I was not in Queens, I discovered.  The fuzzy typeface ten feet above said I was on Avenue of Americas, whatever that meant, but the on cross from it said Christopher, so I don’t know, maybe I was in Manhattan after all.  It’s so hard to know where one is most of the time.  France?  No, Houston.  God, that actually happened to me once.  Ending up in Houston. Christ. 

So I was riffling through my handbag for this ancient lamp receipt. Looking at the address ,and by Christ, I couldn’t make the damned thing out.  I thought it was 411 Sixth Avenue, but at that moment it looked like 911.  I mean, in that classic fancy script, look at those numbers side by side one day, they are almost identical.  Well, I couldn’t make heads nor tails if it, so I asked a passing waitress if the number looked like nine eleven or not.  Well, you had never seen anyone more offended.  So, I asked a passing police officer, because i figured that he’s out on the street all day, he should know where things are.  Well, you would have thought I just said the Virgin Mary was a common street prostitute and gave his crabs in his big fat bushy mustache.

Honestly, New York.

That’s when Joe Torre pulled up in his car and said to me, “It looks like you need some help.”

Well, he was right, I did need help!  He was pretty swift, that one.  I’ll tell you more later, long story short, he ended up poisoning me and following me back to California to stalk me some more and…oh, I’ll tell you later.

by Catherine Swarmy

Honestly, that tune, “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” is a little presumptuous, isn’t it?  I mean, it just reeks of lower immigrant class, the  “gimme gimme” graft of the Lower East Side hustle.  I can imagine its author sitting on the elevated train to the Polo Grounds now, penning this anthem on the back of his parole card.

Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the crowd…

Good Lord.  Whatever on Earth happened to saying “please”?  

Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack…

Already I have sprung for admission to the yard, now I am to feed your ungrateful  Dago ass as well?

I don’t care if I ever get back…

Well, there is a shocker for sure.  You have nothing to go back to except sixteen hours of hard labor in a stockyard, the ruough-and-tumble saloon, the cramped Polish boarding house that reeks of ham hocks and cabbage.

For it’s root, root, root for the home team, if they don’t win it’s a shame…

You’ve gotten a free ride so far today, Seamus, but like a spoiled child in silver threaded swaddling clothes, all will be for naught if you team comes up the lesser in the run column.  <i>That’s</i> the real shame.

Instead of singing that song at the seventh inning stretch, I propose a little skit.  I have the first line, I’ll have Winston finish the rest:

“Say, i read in the newspaper paper this morning that the Pittsburgh Pirates are in town. What say we head on over to the Candlestick Park and take in a game, just you and me?  Why, it is even my treat, friend.”

By Catherine Swarmy

Honestly, I figured I would just retire in peace when it appeared that The Elm Street Journal was not going to get back off the mat. Really, I did. I had heard many false promises from that smarmy, snake-tounged Sean Gothman over the past seven years that he was going to get his fat ass into whatever “gear” would enable him to get the god damned thing back on its feet. I don’t know how gears work, they require oil, I think. Well, all the oil obviously went to his hair, to look at him. What a god damned wreck. I mean, honestly, my god damned butler has a net-page. It must not be that hard. I would wager to say that it is not as hard as, say, building a cuckoo clock, or making waffles. Apparently, that, taking out the trash, and a palm full of Redkin is too much for ol’ Gothman. It must be.

And, my dear, it’s not as though I foolishly signed an exclusive seven year contract in 2002. Remember that? Jesus, I must have been drugged when I signed that. Who knew Gothman was a contract lawyer, though. I mean, he must be, because my attorney, the famed Alan Dershowitz, could not find one god damned loop-hole for me to wriggle out of. Can you believe it? Me and George Bush, stuck in a hopeless situation once again.

Oh, I have never told you about that, have I? Well, our president, George W. Bush, and I once spent a very uncomfortable night in an overturned Lincoln at the bottom of Long Island Sound in 1964. Sure, sure, I was a little drunk, what can I say. The father, that old goat, turned the screws on the press to keep it all out of the papers, I guess I should be grateful for that, at least. But that kid, what an idiot. I’m afraid the whole incident left quite a mark on him. No, really. He was quite the poet and gentlemen before almost drowning that night. After, not so much. I did notice that, after me, he seemed to go for women who were vehicularly reckless.

Well, honestly, either way, I refuse to vote for a Yale man. Don’t blame me, I voted for Carrie Fisher.

So, it was in 2005 when Dersh called me up to give me the bad news. After three years and thirty million dollars in legal fees, Derch telephones one afternoon and goes, “Catherine, I’m sorry, but this contract is airtight. I can’t find a way for you to take that position at Vanity Fair.” Yes, Vanity Fair, under suggestion from my dear friend Christopher Hitchens, was reconsidering its blacklist of your truly. Hitch called up ol’ S.I. Newhouse himself to make the plea for my case. I mean what did S.I. care if I burned all Graydon Carter’s hair off with a carelessly discarded butt. This is business! Besides, almost all the hair grew back.

“Well, god damn, Dersh, I have an idea, I saw it in a film with Rosalind Russell.” I bleated brightly.

“Ughhhh, Catherine…”

“No, no, hear me out,” I said. “Rosalind Russell was in a similar situation in some cock-a-mamie pic I saw the other day, and you know what she did? She just tore the contract up and that was that. Did you ever think of doing that?”

I couldn’t hear Dersh’s response as the line went dead.

Well, it seemed I was semi-officially retired.Here I was, hmmbmmbbmmm years old, and I was retired. Can you believe it? It was all I ever even wanted out of life.

Except that my husband, Dick, had returned. Oh, you remember Dick Swarmy. He was missing and presumed dead for six years and the god damned police had it in their pea-brains that I had God-all to do with it? Some fancy detective work, there, don’t you think? I would certainly murder my husband for money just to be, for all intensive purposes, under god damned house arrest and not able to spend any of it. Yeah, that sound like me. (I am being sarcastic.) Dick had come home after a spiritual pilgrimage to India, of all places, and was basically a “new man”. Except I think he was an even bigger dolt than before he disappeared. What did he learn in India but to take his shoes off before entering the house. Oh, now I’m going to heaven, look at my stinking, fetid feet. Idiot. He told me he learned something called “Kundalini Sex”, where he could, get this, belay his orgasm for hours and hours. First off, I could barely stomach the usual seven minutes of his flabby corpse flopping around on top of me, what made him think I would spend a whole god damned afternoon in his coital clutches. Second, I felt sorry for the brown skinned girl with whom he practiced this technique for all those years he ran around as shoeless as a beggar.

But get this. Instead of getting cross with me for refusing his clumsy advances, Dick took the rejection in stride. He instead focused his “energies” on his career. When Dick found the aluminum shed business he left in complete disarray, though, he lost his god damned marbles. He sold the business to Jake Kingston and embarked on a lounge singing career. You read that right, Dick took up singing the songs of Mel Tormé and, at age fifty…whatever… transformed himself into “Richard Swarmy, Viscount of the Standards.” Well, with a name like that, I sarcastically chided, he was sure to go far.

But god damn it, he did go far. He went farther than fucking far. Dick was the toast of the town. He got the key to the city, the key to the county, and a crate of god damned Napa Valley shit wine. The old biddies just loved Dick. We had god damned seventy year old groupies coming to our door at all of 9 am some days, all calling to see my god damned idiot husband. One of them even broke in to leave him a plate of confections made form breakfast cereal. Breakfast cereal. You would think my butler, Winston, would do something to turn them away, but it seemed, at times, that he was encouraging these old dingbats to come and visit. I mean, that god damned shit town had no association with show business before. There were no Oliviers or Gielguds making their home in Yuba City. Then why would Winston start one of those “Star Map” companies in town like we were in god damned Beverly Hills? Our house was the only attraction on the god damned thing.

Well, I had had enough of the hoopla. I decided I was leaving Dick. After thirty years, two marriages, three children who ignored me, and a butler who was somehow richer than I was, I was retiring to New York City.

NEXT TIME: HOW I WAS ALMOST MURDERED BY JOE TORRE.