Word: reefer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...skinny, 15-year-old girl is well schooled in human relations (she has been a Harlem prostitute for a year) and chemistry (drinking water, she knows, helps the smoker extract that last bit of nourishment from a reefer). But Lu Ann is a little weak in geography. "Now Man," she says, "you aint gassin me you really got an ocean you can get to on the subway?" Duke Custis, a knife-scarred hard case at 14, knows well enough where the Atlantic is, even has a vague notion that Europe lies somewhere beyond Coney Island...
...allegory on whatever the reader chooses-the perversity of man, the bright illusion of love, the red-eyed aurochs of war. Dotted throughout the book are moon-mad digressions-a plan to enroll farm boys in the Joy Scouts of America, hike them into Harlem for instruction in reefer rolling; a 14-page hypothesis, mostly in verse, on why Ireland is underpopulated (it wasn't the snakes, Goodman theorizes, that nearsighted St. Patrick banished...
...voice. The biggest voice in the cast, however, belonged to Herbert Gibson, who played Daniel Webster with a wonderful mock dignity. In smaller parts, John Morabito gave an amusing portrayal of the love-sick but proper John Adams, while Sylvia Skolnick enlivened the role of a militant feminist, Jenny Reefer. The cause of suffrage received lusty support from Judy Moore as Lillian Russell...
...most of a second day, rescuers managed to get a few of the crew ashore by breeches buoy. A dozen others plunged into the sea. to be fished out by a crazily weaving Italian rescue launch. By midafternoon, with 15 bluejackets still aboard, the stern half of the Grommet Reefer was lurching dangerously...
Suddenly, thousands of Italians lining the shore let up a roar and pointed seaward. Out of the horizon sped the Leyte and the Midway. Well off the port, they dispatched four helicopters, and within minutes they were hovering over the Grommet Reefer; one by one, the survivors were plucked off to the resounding applause of the onlookers and set ashore. By nightfall, the 37-hour ordeal was over, and the happy crew was giving a banquet for Captain Saukant, last man off the broken Reefer, and in many a Leghorn household that night, Italians feasted happily on American turkeys, which...