Lyman if I have offended anyone

 

Lyman if I have offended anyone

    This one comes from the Palm Desert period when Greg spent after work time in a place called the Sunshine Meat Fish and Liquor Company on Highway 111. It was a Cheers kind of place where the young man felt at home sitting up at the bar with mostly friendly regulars out of the heat of the desert. Greg had used some of his time out in the parched land reading and memorizing the stories of the great Edgar Allen Poe that he could recite flawlessly if he had enough fire water in his belly. On this occasion his hard drinking and hard partying cousin Evan showed up fully loaded and boisterous with a pal who was also schnockered. Evan insisted that Greg recite the opening of the "Fall of the House of Usher" for his buddy and the younger Sheehy was game. He gave the opening long sentence "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."   The inebriated pal shouted "SHAKESPEARE RIGHT!" Evan snatched the fool's hat off his head and began wailing on him shouting "no you fucking idiot...etc. This kept up and developed into scene whereupon the tavern"s CEO Lyman Martin came around the bar, snatched both disturbers of the saloon peace by the scruff of their necks and shoved them over  to the door, kicked it open and tossed them out into the heat. His last words were "and don't ever come back. You are banned!  Like many of those held in the grip of John Barleycorn, Evan attempted to apologize starting with the words "Lyman...if I have offended anyone..." He was caught short by Lyman who stone-walled the contrite gent and repeated the ban. Evan was never to sit on a stool in the Sunshine Meat Fish and Liquor Company again.

     Sadly the "gents" missed the most rousing portion of Greg's performance of the final paragraph that was utterly mesmerizing...

"From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened — there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind — the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight — my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder — there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters — and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the Fall of the House of  Usher"

 During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day  the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.