‘Every Day Is Followed by One That’s Even Worse’

Great conflict often produces great art. Intimations of mortality evoking intimations of morality, and all that stuff.

Regard: “The Aeneid.” “Troilus and Criseyde.” “Man’s Fate.” “V Letter and Other Poems.” “Francis the Talking Mule Joins the Navy.”

To this canon now welcome “Saudi Marines Lament,” provided by Mark Billing, 75, a retired Marine captain living in Vista.

Billing says he’s merely the vessel, not the author. He says he discovered the 10-quatrain poem of irregular meter and unruly rhyme while working as a civilian in the Saudi oil fields in the 1970s.

“Saudi Marines Lament” is an elegy of heat, flies, strange customs and unfulfilled longings. Sample verses:

Somewhere in the Arabia Desert

Where the sun is like a curse

And every day is followed

By one that’s even worse.

Somewhere near the Gulf of Persia

Where a woman is never seen

Where the skies are never cloudy

And the grass is never green.

Where the drinking water is colored

Like the drainage from the sink

And a man can’t drown his sorrows

‘Cause there’s not a beer to drink.

Where the camels are all crummy

And the donkeys slightly worse

An’ we really must be crazy

When we start to writing verse.

Billing caused “Saudi Marines Lament” to be published in the Camp Pendleton newspaper. He wants the home front to appreciate the hardships the troops are facing (See Literature as Morale Booster, “Henry V”).

He retired in 1961 after 25 years in the Corps. He says he’d go to Saudi Arabia in a flash, but he’s a bit slowed up recently.

He survived Guadalcanal just fine, but competing on the senior tennis circuit is playing havoc with his arthritis.

Unanswered Questions

It passed largely unnoticed Tuesday when a 33-year-old prostitute named Helena Klarissa Mueller-Beilschmidt pleaded guilty in San Diego Municipal Court to being an accessory to pandering.

But, if the case had gone to trial, it could have been big news.

Among the witnesses called by the prosecution: Richard T. Silberman, now at the Metropolitan Correctional Center awaiting assignment to a full-time federal pokey.

Prosecutors won’t say what they wanted to ask Silberman about Mueller-Beilschmidt, who reportedly once worked for Rolodex madam Karen Wilkening.

Eugene Iredale, attorney for Mueller-Beilschmidt, insists his client does not know Silberman except through news coverage:

“Helena has told me that she does not know the man and was not involved with him. He has suffered enough.”

Iredale says Silberman’s name arose only when his client’s boyfriend told prosecutors a bunch of wild stories about an international ring of prostitutes, in an effort to strike a bargain in an assault case.

A Biting Courtroom Scene

High and mighty.

* The courtroom for the Betty Broderick murder trial was dusted for fleas Thursday.

The parasites keep biting the court reporter on the legs. It’s a common problem at the sagging courthouse in downtown San Diego.

* North County video stores are putting some slash-and-gore videos off limits to customers under age 17.

* Sheriff John Duffy, nearing retirement, was quoted here Wednesday about his rules for job offers: No government work, no full-time work, no working with the media.

Wise guys are now suggesting that those rules also guided Duffy’s erratic approach to being sheriff in recent years.