MIKE GENIELLA:
A dozen nuns from the Sisters of the Presentation order in San Francisco arrived by charter bus Wednesday to attend a Memorial Mass for Sister Jane Kelly at St. Mary in Ukiah. After they toured Plowshares, the legendary dining hall for the down and out. Sister Jane was a co-founder along with Debra Meeks and Martin Bradley and Susan Crane. Generous Mendocino County donors covered the costs to transport the nuns to Ukiah and back to SF.
ED NOTES: IRATE GAUL STORMS BOONVILLE NEWSPAPER OFFICE
AVA News Service (October 2009)
Franco-American relations in the Anderson Valley took a turn for the worse last Wednesday when a dual citizen of France and Boonville, Gilles d’Aymery, stormed the tranquil offices of the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
The Frenchman was upset about his subscription.
Mr. d’Aymery was sputtering mad, so angry that his alcohol-ravaged features had turned a deep purple, whether from an escalating pique or a long morning with his head in serial bottles of pinot, was not clear, but the choleric Frenchman had a head full of blood for a fact.
Blurting out a wide range of mostly incoherent complaints and purely gratuitous insults which finally culminated in his demand for the return of the forty dollars he’d mailed to the Boonville weekly in lieu of our fifty dollar subscription price, Mr. d’Aymery could not be satisfied.
In a letter to the paper preceding his stormy visit, Mr. d’Aymery said the paper was “not worth fifty dollars.” We nevertheless pro-rated the forty he’d sent us to a 9-month subscription, but d’Aymery then demanded the whole forty back. If we wouldn’t return the forty, he said he wanted a full year for forty dollars.
The Advertiser’s policy since 1955, all the way back to our founder, the late Homer Mannix, has been No Refunds.
Especially to citizens of France.
Mannix once warned us, “I’ve been to France, and no more supercilious bastards exist on the face of this earth. And they all pretend not to speak English! If any of them ever show up in Boonville, squeeze ‘em for what you can and frog march ‘em back down the stairs and to hell outtahere.”
So, last Wednesday, here’s this French lunatic running through our office door like he’s Andre The Giant.
And without so much as an “Excusez moi,” Mr. d’Aymery, pronounced in American as “Jill Amory,” interrupted a scheduled consultation between AVA staffer Mark Scaramella and former interim AVA editor Dave Severn to discuss this season’s wine grape harvest.
“Give me my forty dollars back!” the rude Frenchman shouted.
Scaramella, for a frantic instant, thought maybe it was a hold-up, a work site mugging.
As Severn looked on aghast, the gentlemanly Scaramella calmly suggested to the intruder, “You could at least say hello, Jill, and try being polite.”
This appeal to whatever residual civility Amory might possess only further inflamed him.
“Forty now!” Amory repeated, extending his hand, his spud-shaped magenta nose throbbing neon shades of purplish fury.
Scaramella calmly explained to Amory that the AVA doesn’t give refunds, but the nine-month subscription he’d now purchased with his dubious forty dollar check, signed with an indecipherable, megalomaniacal flourish as if by the Sun King himself, could be sent to someone else if Amory no longer desired a week’s worth of bracing American clarity for the next nine months.
But Amory, who considers himself an intellectual, as do most of his windy countrymen – these are the people who think Jerry Lewis is funny and that Richard Nixon was a great statesman – was beyond all rationality. Leaping from subject to subject, spraying bilingual insults and demands, Amory soon complained about what had been written about him in two previous papers, angrily waving an AVA in Scaramella’s face. He said his first letter of complaint was not intended for publication, probably because even he understood it revealed him as a…
Well, whatever, as the young people say.
Scaramella explained to Amory that he’d had nothing to do with the decision to publish the wine-basted Frenchman’s letter nor the snappish ed replies that accompanied them.
Amory then demanded to see the no refund policy “in writing.”
Scaramella explained that paper doesn’t have written policies beyond those stated in our publisher’s box having to do with prices. In any case, demands for refunds were foreign to our experience, and we weren’t about to begin doing them now, especially for an uncredentialed person like him who regularly insults our fine, fat land as a country of imbeciles.
Mr. Severn spoke up to say that he’d never given refunds during his three-year tenure as boss at the AVA.
Amory looked at Severn as if he was considering a physical assault on him before issuing another demand, this one a demand to speak to Ling Anderson, his fraught mind somehow discerning where the publication’s real authority lay.
Scaramella said he “wasn’t at liberty to divulge Mrs. Anderson’s contact information,” and informed Amory that in any case he was more likely to get a refund from George Bush than he was from her.
Amory went from purple to apoplectic crimson as he proceeded to denounce Scaramella as an idiot, a flunky, and, several times, “a peece of sheet,” and so on in tediously repetitious fashion, all of the abuse utterly lacking in imagination, and all of it in cartoonishly accented French.
Scaramella and Severn said later that they’d had a hard time not laughing.
The AVA should have returned his check, Amory insisted, especially if we didn’t think it was enough for a subscription. If we hadn’t returned his check then he should get a full year’s subscription for his forty dollars.
Scaramella asked Amory what he thought The New Yorker magazine would do if he sent them less than the subscription price.
“They’d send it back,” said the irate Frenchman.
“Then why would you send it in the first place if you know they’d send it back? Just to hassle them like you’re hassling us?”
Amory fumed.
“I told Amory,” Scaramella recalled, “that since we don’t give refunds and the price of a subscription is $50, we gave him 75% of a subscription for his $40. That was not only the best we could do, but it was fair considering he was insulting us and harassing us as he went.”
“Do you realize what you are saying?” shouted the choleric Gaul. “You’re saying you only give me 75% of a subscription but I paid you 80%.”
Scaramella explained his math, pointing out that there was also a small deduction for the extra time handling his non-standard subscription, which, of course, Amory rejected. The Frenchman turned to Severn.
“Did you see what Bruce wrote about me last week?” he asked Severn. “Bruce” seemed to be an overly familiar reference to Mr. Bruce Anderson, publisher and editor of this fine publication.
“I haven’t got around to reading last week’s paper yet,” replied Severn.
“Do you have last week’s paper?” Amory asked Scaramella. “I’ll show him what Bruce wrote.”
“Back issues are $1,” Scaramella blandly replied.
Amory was astonished.
“I thought he was going to hit me,” Scaramella said. “I thought I’d have to give him my old Air Force one-two, but I couldn’t remember the three-four if the one-two didn’t work on him.”
Scaramella explained to Severn how Amory tried to pay $40 for a $50 subscription because, Amory had declared, a year’s subscription “wasn’t worth $50.”
Severn asked Amory if he really had tried to get fifty for forty.
“Yes,” replied a seething Amory.
“Then I agree with Mark,” Severn said.
It didn’t seem possible that Amory could become angrier than he was, but he was instantly even more enraged, shaking with indignation, his face going from wino purple to Muscat black.
Scaramella poured on the provocations.
Scaramella told Amory that he was free to take the AVA to small claims court, but a small claims action would probably cost him at least $40 and he’d lose anyway.
Amory seethed.
A moment of tense silence passed until Scaramella said, “I have nothing more to say, Jill. We’re obviously not getting anywhere. Good-bye.”
Amory stood silent, his chest heaving.
“He looked like he was going to implode,” Scaramella said.
Amory suddenly reached across Severn to shove a pile of papers and a nearly full cup of coffee on Scaramella’s desk into Scaramella’s lap.
“I caught the cup of coffee just in time and reset it on the desk,” Scaramella said later. “I was getting mad. ‘That’s it, Jill, I’m calling the cops.’ I reached for the phone.”
Amory dashed out the door.
Severn said, “Well, he was obviously tanked.”
“Tanked or not,” Scaramella said, “that last outburst was way outta line. It reminded me of the time Supervisor Colfax spit on my shoe.”
A few minutes after Amory had left the office, Scaramella, on his way to the Boonville Post Office, encountered resident Deputy Keith Squires. Scaramella told the deputy about the Frenchman’s verbal assault on the AVA’s work space, and how Amory had shoved Scaramella’s in-basket and coffee cup at him.
Squires said he’d never had any contact with Amory and didn’t know him.
“You will,” Scaramella said, “if he comes into the office like that again.”
Editor Anderson, the agent of all this trans-Atlantic hoo-rah, was at the ballpark in San Francisco at the time. “The only place I find true peace anymore.” Informed of the incident and that the Frenchman wanted his money back, the Editor snorted, “If we start caving into every side street Parisian pimp who wanders in here wanting a ten dollar discount, hell, it might cost us another ten bucks some day. Homer Mannix was right. No refunds!”
JIM SHIELDS:
Although Supes John Haschak and Ted Williams did the right thing by voting in favor of cutting Supervisors salaries, they were out-voted by their colleagues (Mo Mulheren, Bernie Norvell, and Madeline Cline) who evidently have a different set of priorities when it comes to balancing a deficit budget, even though CEO Darcy Antle estimates next year's budget has a $16 million "structural deficit", some $10 million more than this year's deficit of $6 million.
Meanwhile, in the unincorporated areas of the county, local economies remain in ruins thanks in large part to the ongoing economic disaster brought about by the failed, convoluted, and tortuously unworkable cannabis ordinance. But a majority of the Board demonstrates they have their priorities in order by refusing to make even a minimal sacrifice toward balancing a budget by reducing their pay from $110,715.00 to $103,008.
The Board is now on a 6-week summer hiatus with their next public meeting not occurring until September 9th.
“IT WAS MIRACULOUS. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
— Joseph Heller
SHERIFF KENDALL:
My mother used to say, “I once cried because I had no shoes then I met a person who had no feet”
We live in a world of comparisons. We compare our success to those around us and it creates jealousy and complaining. Many of us are extremely lucky. My father and I were driving on a short hunting trip up to the forest outside of Covelo. He was talking about his youth in Point Arena and I was shocked how many kids he knew who had died of something I had never really seen in my lifetime including polio and the flu.
My father also spoke about how lucky he was to have two jobs when many folks only had one. He was always swinging a hammer on the side or dealing with a few head of cattle, constantly doing something with his time which benefitted our family.
I wish we could all experience life one generation back. Maybe we would be a little more grateful for the life we currently have. We should consider ourselves lucky to have the first world problems we seem to complain about.
“HE HAD KNOWN SEVERAL MEN who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”
— Larry McMurtry, ‘Lonesome Dove’
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR:
The entire Colombo series is now available on Prime. I watched the second pilot episode last night, starring the wonderful Lee Grant, as a brilliant “lady” trial lawyer, who plots an ingenious way to murder her dull and decrepit husband and then trades barbs and witticisms with Peter Falk for an hour or so until finally being entrapped by the bumbling detective. What I didn’t know about Grant, and endears her even more deeply to me, is that she effectively lost 12 years of her acting (and directing) career for refusing to testify to HUAC, after the snitch Edward Dymtryk named Grant’s husband, the screenwriter Arnold Manoff, as a member of the CP. Grant, who’d been nominated for an Academy Award for her first film role (Detective Story), refused to testify and was blacklisted for more than a decade in the prime of her career. She was probably one of the most talented people of her generation having danced in the American Ballet Theater under Balanchine & studied method acting with Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg. Grant later said that the constant hounding she experienced during the McCarthy Era so traumatized her that she would go into “a trance” any time she was asked about it. Grant became an accomplished director; her documentary on homelessness, Down and Out in America, won an Oscar for best documentary feature in 1986.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Thank goodness that all the conservative Big Donors of this fine nation are on the up and up and honest as the day is long and never ever dream of self dealing while upholding the intent and spirit of The Law at all times. They will save the day for all us Little People and all will be well!
[2] Marxist? Love y’all but there’s probably 5 total “Marxists” in the entire US.
Socialism = Economy organized for the benefit of the people
Capitalism = Economy organized for the profits of a select few
Marxism is not charity. Charity is charity. Which is what I assume you’re referring to when you write about Marxism in LA. This exaltation of the individual at the expense of society as a whole is called liberalism. Unchecked immigration is financial capitalism raising their profits by bringing in cheap labor. Def nothing to do with Marxism. And I’m def opposed to unchecked immigration. Like, duh.
I think we can agree that the US needs a government of action that fights for working families. Lord knows how we get that with Americans programmed to hate each other, but someday maybe people will begin to understand how we the people have been divided and thus conquered.
[3] There are a lot of bright and serious members of Congress. But a lot (most) are really dumb. If you meet and talk to them it is shocking how dim witted and ignorant they are. Both parties are represented, but lately the Dems are trying to with the stupid sweepstakes.
[4] The California of the Beach Boys and Mommas and Papas, is well on its way to becoming the dystopian nightmare of Bladerunner. Charlie Manson’s wokeness morality where Willie Brown’s “girlfriend” moves, almost to the top, of the political food pyramid in Newsom's regime and Nancy’s family gets better percentage returns on their investments than Warren Buffet.
[5] I am a Criminal Defense Attorney, and it infuriates me that some of my clients go to jail for Driving Without a License, while Liberal Elites can, and do, literally get away with murder, with no accountability whatsoever. The two-tracked justice system appalls me, as a Criminal Lawyer, and a former prosecutor, as well as a citizen. If Joe or Jane Six-Pack gets pulled over for speeding, they are in deep trouble. If James Comey posts a written threat of harm to a sitting President, nothing of consequence happens to him. It all strikes me as deeply unjust. Things need to change. I feel like the US I grew up in, during the 70s and 80s, no longer exists, and has been replaced with a corrupt, bankrupt Kleptocracy.
[6] It’s National Vinyl Record Day. Take a spin! I miss the album covers. Roger Dean, Hipgnosis, Storm Thorgerson… Fabulous art that added much to the magic of the music.
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