-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

September 16, 2016

I remember, it was warm, it was cold; the rain was falling, there was deep, deep snow; her hair was rust red, was apple gold. She was a Vermont Yankee, a Georgia peach. Crisp leaves, colored like crayons, fell; slick green, birthed leaves unfolded.

It was the early 70s, in Chicago. One of my four roommates brought home a stray girl he had met walking the streets of Old Town. She told him she needed a place to crash. We often hosted crashers, from all over the country. Her backpack was as big as she was. Her hair was twisted into a long braid. She might have been a teen; she might have been twenty.

We greeted her, set out blankets and a pillow on the couch. I played my guitar and sang a song or two. We drank a couple bottles of red wine, and Ruthie Traveler hugged each one of us and passed out Hershey’s Kisses. And we all went to bed, and we all were disappointed.

Sometime in the night, my bedroom door opened. The apartment was pitch black. A few weeks ago, we had been robbed while we were asleep. So I was alert.

But this wasn’t a robber. Ruthie Traveler had decided the couch was uncomfortable. Could she share my mattress on the floor? Clothes on, back to back – yes? Safe, yes? So I slipped my jeans back on, and yes.

There was the flick of a lighter, the pungent smell of marijuana smoke. We inhaled, we giggled like kids. We were kids.

“When I lay beside her, her body looks like silver; The white places of her are pillows soft and fine”

Until there were no clothes, no space, no right-side-up. No nos. Her husky laugh. The flickering candle in my hand tattooing light upon her bird breasts, her red bird’s nest.

I almost ruined the moment with questions. Ruthie Traveler answered the first question: I am leaving tomorrow.

The beauty of her face is, the little secret places, that melt when I kiss her and whisper she is mine

I’m not yours. Thumb . . . here. Your fingers . . . there. Strum me, guitar man.

“Lady don’t leave my bed tonight; I need your love in the shadow light”

Tell me about you.

No.

“Like salt air, she is a taste of time: She is milk white wine”

The next morning, I drove her to the Iowa border, to a rest stop on the interstate. She was headed for Oregon, for Baja, California. She shouldered her backpack, tugged the hem of her granny dress in place, tapped on my window and kissed the glass.

She mouthed: Thanks for the rides.

And she laughed and covered her red mouth with her freckled hand. She was a robber after all, of a heart, not goods.

And she walked away. I watched her talk to a truck driver, shake his hand, climb aboard his rig.

I remember, it was warm, it was cold; the rain was falling, there was deep, deep snow; her hair was rust red, was apple gold. She was a Vermont Yankee, a Georgia peach. Crisp leaves colored like crayons fell; slick green, birthed leaves unfolded.

September 9, 2016

Charles Dickens, upon making a pile of money from the publication his story, “A Christmas Carol,” lamented to a friend that he had created a monster. Before the story, Londoners celebrated the holiday modestly. After the story, the described pageantry of good will, avarice, gluttony and charity evolved to our modern, vulgar celebration.

Dickens, an obsessive fellow, ever aware of the bottom line re selling books, began the Quixotical task of writing one Christmas story a year for the rest of his life. It didn’t go well. But one such story, “The Cricket and the Hearth,” enjoyed modest success.

Crickets are perfectly harmless and amusing creatures. They are packed with protein – just ask Scout the Cat, who has been obsessively catching crickets in the basement, eating off their legs and bringing the alive, chirping torsos upstairs for me to dispatch.

Crickets sing beautifully on September nights, in the wet grass: “Crick, crick, crick, please have sex with me, I won’t shut up this song until you, Jennifer Lawrence Cricket, spread your legs – if you have legs, due to a fiendish cat.”

One such horny cricket has been ruining my sleep for days, by singing under my bedroom window.

A friend advised me to get out of bed, grab a flashlight, run outside to the back of Genehouse, shine the flashlight, temporarily blinding the sex fiend, and “kill the sum bitch.” I actually did this, two nights ago, a gentle rain falling, me in tennis shoes and tighty whities, flashing light upon the cute little bugger below my window. I intended to relocate the sexually starved critter, but I accidentally stumbled and smashed the “sum bitch” to a cricket smoothie.

Then I walked back to the front of the house, where about a thousand other assorted insects were humping my porch light. There was even a green praying mantis under that light. I began swatting at the horde so that they wouldn’t get into the house, then I reached for the screen door and the praying mantis flew into my pie hole, whereupon I spat the mantis into the stratosphere.

A lone car drove by at that exact moment – of course it did – me standing in my undies under a lamplight and launching a green praying mantis to the Space Shuttle. If the driver was drunk, he or she might have assumed I was an avenging demon, and driven to the nearest church for prayer and contriteness.

(The church would have been locked, of course, leaving the sobbing alcoholic lying on the stairs, a vision of an old man in his tighty whities dancing in his or her head, his or her only option to join the Church of Praying Mantis Almighty Apostolic, Hash # “Et hummingbird Eatus.”)

The next morning, I went down into the basement and swept up dead cricket and water bug and unknown species of bugs, into a dust pan. One of the bugs shuddered. It was encased in a spider web. Which alerted me to notice a funnel-shaped spider web under the stairs, reach in with my broom bristles and tug the web into the light, revealing a bulbous black spider which came charging out, which tripped on an exoskeleton and rolled onto its back, revealing a red hourglass shape, which prompted me to internally scream – in Basement, no one can hear you scream – which motivated me to smash that bitch black widow spider into the Kingdom of Heaven.

I am not a violent man. I am not a man who wantonly slaughters insects or kills snakes. But sleep deprivation has led me to a life of bounty hunting, of walking in the night in my tighty whities, forever intent on noise abatement, cricket displacement and spider effacement and my own debasement.

And so I cry out to the night with Dickensian delight: “Bah, humbug!”

September 8, 2016 “Like a Rolling Stone”

My September started off with a bang. I had planned a two-week excursion through several national parks, including Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon, starting and ending in California. I was due to be there tomorrow, at Dave and Linda’s house.

Then the third double ear infection of the last month and a half set in, and all the antibiotics I had been taking attacked my gut. A CT scan revealed that I also had a “rolling” kidney stone that was due to pass. The doctor told me I would be in agony flying, could possibly rupture my eardrums, and that I shouldn’t be in any wilderness away from health care. So I was grounded.

And oh, yes. No drinking.

At 6:03 p.m. last evening, the rolling stone began its journey to the tip of Gene Jr. and took the entire night to pass through. I scared Scout the Cat with my yelping, wincing, moaning, cursing, quick breathing, belly-aching, agitating, agonizing, convulsing, tingling and algospasming. She might have thought I was Donald Trump, as we had just watched him bloviate on TV.

To summarize: I am downsized, with no Linda’s pies, I am tripless, wilderness deprived, stuck in the Midwest, all reckless’d up with no place to go, wineless and altogether useless.

This is why I don’t own a gun. Farmer Orville is after me to buy a gun. “You never know.” Oh, I know. At 3:20 a.m., I would have blown my head off.

What does passing a rolling stone feel like? Worse than my gut infection. Like sticking a live electric wire up my urethra (not to be confused with Aretha). Like Alton’s annual Halloween parade marching through my peenie. Like Sara Palin’s voice reverberating off my ureter (not to be confused with Uranus). Like the National Rifle Association holding a convention in my bladder. Like Melania Trump illegally entering the U.S. through my dick. Like Dick Cheney shooting me through my spermaltor. Like undead Phyllis Schlaffly hitting my stick with her joyschtick. Like Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 e-mails shooting at warp speed through my man tunnel.

That’s what.

Did I mention no drinking?

My morning cocktail includes nose drops, ear drops, gut med, antihistamines, Tylenol, probiotics, antibiotics and uncle biotics. My male, uh, appendage needs robotics and erotics. My ears ring, my ear rings have ear rings, my eardrums are playing the tympani slams of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” my earlobes have waxy yellow buildup, my ear rims have corkscrewy hairs rising up like kelp strands.

I know, starving children in Africa, Republicans losing the House and Senate, Black Lives Matter, yes we really will have no bananas, and some pretty boy lost Taylor Swift vagina privileges.

But, hey! Hey! My Whiteyness is hovering over the abyss. I’m sick as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! My colon is humongous with colitis fungus. My arthritis is detritus. My Doppler radar predicts pee storm coming. And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard pee gonna fall.

Not that I’m complaining.

September 2, 2016

My friends Mike and Cathy have had a fruit and vegetable stand for a decade. And Monday, it closes for good. Cathy has serious heart trouble and Mike is battling cancer, his second battle. All their doctors have ordered them to stop.

They took me out to dinner tonight, to thank me for helping out. As usual, I brought home a cantaloupe and green peppers and a box of apples.

“As usual.” There are so many phrases we use, in the keeping of traditions. The stand and its owners have been a part of my life since I moved back to Alton four years ago this October. Farmer Orville and his wife Quilt Queen – same thing. The four of them are cheerful and resolute.

So why am I depressed?

Last call (a phrase I dreaded in my youth), last stand, last words, last love of a life (this is a common phrase in the online dating world), last waltz (love you, Levon Helm and The Band).

My very first play featured a juke box, and if you pressed H-11, you’d hear me (or the character Golden Jones) singing a song I wrote for the production. The juke box was the heart. At the end of the second act the character Barrett Lee Wedding shot the juke box, the heart. If you want joy from me tonight, you’ll have to put a lot of quarters in the juke box.

This afternoon, I saw two stick bugs, each about four inches long, mating rear end to rear end, while clinging to a parking lot wall. There was no Baby, baby in the ceremony, just transference so that little stick bugs could be born so that –

Wooly caterpillars crossed the roads to get to the other sides, and I stopped and picked up a few and helped them along. The hard truth is, evolution favors the caterpillars that dodge cars and zig zag their way to trees so that –

Tomorrow I’ll help out at the Last Stand. Kiss Cathy adieu, shake Mike’s hand. A week from now I’ll be standing at the Grand Canyon so that –

So that I can get on to my own last stand, or last sleep. There is a reason I am writing this. There is no reason I am writing this. Down the hourglass I spiral. Somehow I think that will be easier than watching the last stands of my loved ones. Death, imagining death, is hardest on the living.

Everything familiar is fading away. Soon I will be my beloved Taliana and Amanda and Bekira’s last uncle. The lifetime friends are running out of life time. The great hourglass in the sky is emptying – you can hear it, hear the gritty sand scouring the glass.

As my friend Soren Kierkegaard used to say: “One can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it – you will regret both.”

I write this by last summer evening lamplight, the cicadas singing long, mournful dirges: my favorite natural sound all my life.

August 23, 2016

Dear Mr. Baldwin,

I am a director of marketing at Speedo, and a big fan of the Genehouse Chronicles. As you may know, we just yesterday fired that rapscallion and disgraced Olympian Ryan Lochte. We won’t be using his bulge in a Speedo ad anytime soon!

Genehouse, we at Speedo are ready to move on to bigger and better things – if you catch my drift. We have decided to launch a Speedo line for older men, and I personally would like you to come aboard – if you get my meaning.

Specifically, the company is debuting its new Speedo Incognito, the bathing suit for the man who has nothing! (How do we know you have nothing? We saw those bad boy naked pics you sent to Jennifer Lawrence on Instagram!)

Genehouse, do you remember when you were a lad, and your girlfriend stuffed Kleenex into her bra to enhance her baby bazooms? Well, Speedo Incognito, with its patented Bulge Implant to Enhance Men’s Endowments (BITEME), plumps up your pals and beguine’s your boys – wink-wink-nudge-nudge – and your lady friend(s) will say, “Wowza!” So long as she(they) doesn’t (don’t) touch anything.

Mr. Baldwin, I envision you standing above your Mississippi River, packed into your Speedo Incognito, your pecs stuffed into our SpeedoManBra (T) with Flexiboob (T), reading a poem about Nature and ready to dive into the Father of Waters, a Leonard Cohen soundtrack singing “Suzanne, now seventy-years-old, takes you down in your Speedo Incognito and SpeedoManBra (T) with Flexiboob (T), to her place by the river.”

And since Halloween is just around the corner, and we know that the Alton Halloween Parade is the oldest parade in the country, we will build you a float of your own in which you and your old high school pals Jake and Ted and Don and Charlie all stand proudly in your Speedo Incognitos and throw candy to the kiddies!

Enclosed is my card, which has all my personal phone numbers. Speaking of numbers, Speedo is prepared to pay you in double figures – if you Grok me – HUGE DOUBLE FIGURES!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Patti Hearst Castle

Director of Marketing

Speedo Incognito, SpeedoManBra (T), Flexiboob. (T)

August 26, 2016

I walk for three hours, starting early in the morning to avoid the creeping heat and humidity. I hear steam coming off the fields, like so many hissing snakes. The ground is soaked from last night’s storm and the roads are scarred with trails of mud.

On Stroke Hill, I see a Cooper’s hawk emerge from a tree and glide in a straight line down to a field, and there is a wail, a rabbit, and then there are only bits of rabbit. The hawk raises its head and glares at me, as if I were going to steal its food. How could I not crave raw rabbit?

A line of ironwood trees, bark twisted in tumultuous swirls, drop their heavy Osage oranges onto the asphalt. There are still pioneer home sites with fence posts hewn from steel-like ironwood. Rose of Sharon blooms up and down the road, and brown-eyed Susan and Queen Ann’s lace. In the sun patches, butterflies maneuver for space, blue swallowtails charging at blue fritillaries, tiger swallowtails chasing yellow dog-eye sulphurs, and tiny dappled checkerspots moving around the melee.

At the bottom of the long hill, Hummingbird Man’s ten feeders have customers, the rubythroats all frenzied, all warned by a signal that soon it will be time to fly to Mexico. And there are the first striped wooly caterpillars inching their way west-to-east. And the great emerald green of forest slowly removes its makeup.

Water drips from seeps in the limestone bluff walls, water drips from leaves, salt water runs in rivulets down my body, water courses through every crack and niche and ditch of earth, water bubbles up from mud.

Along the island, great egrets and snowy egrets fish. I see a mother drop a minnow into its baby’s beak, the squawking youngster wanting more, more. Blue herons perch on stilt legs and scan the water’s coffee-colored surface. Carp roil and splash, their fins above water.

On the River Road trail, acorns have begun to fall. I kick them soccer style, trying to keep them on the path. In two more weeks, every step will crack with smashed nuts. Blacksnakes and blue racers are on the move. My neighbor found a rat snake in her house a few days ago, the serpent seeking out rodents.

I climb two three-hundred-foot hill bluffs, getting in shape for my next month’s adventure at the Grand Canyon. Horseflies suck my neck and sting my shoulder blades. The landscape of two rivers and flood plain and channel trees emerge, Missouri covered in blue haze, in cottonwood seed, in rich muck.

Then home, exhausted, exhilarated, gasping for air, nervous, bite-marked, bad kneecap crackling. Grateful. Worried. Un-blind.

Tom Waitts in my inner ear: “I don’t want to grow up.”

August 22, 2016

There are four walkways up the bluffs near my house, ranging from easy to exhaustion. Stroke Hill is steep, but not so steep as to be overly challenging. Clifton Hill is moderate, but you’re walking alongside the traffic all the way up. Rio Vista Park is by far the prettiest, as it winds its way through a beautiful woodland.

And then there is Stiritz Lane, straight up from the river for fifty yards, bending to the right, climbing again, winding right, climbing once more and becoming a country lane which takes you to the highway. On a hot day, Stiritz Lane will flat out kill you. You will lose half your sweat on that peak, and your legs will cramp, but then there is the glade of sweet-smelling pink mimosas where you can rest, each flower hosting hummingbirds or butterflies or bees.

The view from the top: Mississippi River below, and flatland all wooded and green on the far shore then the two lanes of trees a few miles to the south that line the Missouri River. It’s quite a sight, storm and sunlight, but it becomes a stunning painting in certain light.

Like yesterday’s light, when the Navaho turquoise sky, untouched by pollution, dappled with concatenations of slight, porcelain clouds blown by pursed windlips, made me exclaim, “Oh my god.” And walkers and bikers and neighbors exclaimed over it, acted as witnesses to the wedding of Sky and River, and I was the singer and the poet.

And the creatures which draw strength from the sere sun, the fritillary and dog-eye sulfur and swallowtail and purple hairstreak and monarch butterflies, the four-inch long red-tail and the tiny blue-tail skinks, the grasshoppers with finely colored black lace wings, the legions of hopping crickets, the dragonflies: all bathed in the golden light.

The music of all those rubbing wings and legs and mouth parts was a string orchestra, like the dream of Charles Ives, the great American composer who envisioned a performance of one of his symphonies as being played by orchestras across two mountaintops.

I stood at the top of the bluff and meditated, and I was joined by a doe, which emerged from the woods behind, its white tail flicking, its large ears flapping to ward off insects.

Then a car came from the north, a blue car, a blue of Man, and the car reached me in seconds, its driver, a young woman, bent over the steering wheel and speeding as though she might launch into the river. I raised my hands and yelled, “Stop!” She didn’t stop, but she slowed to a crawl, turned down her window and said sullenly, “What?”

“You need to slow down.”

She gave me the finger and revved up the car and dropped below the bluff top, seemingly intent on running over a creature or a kid. At least I gave her a chance, a pause. We could have talked, stood silent in awe of the river.

Where does everyone think they’re going? Why rage along bluff roads and peach orchard roads and strawfield roads, like they’re your personal race tracks? Attention young people, you’re going to Death – that’s it. You started dying the second you were born. Any joy along the journey, sip it, savor it. Nothing you do, poem nor website nor school nor fame, will save you.

Luckily, the Navaho sky and the clouds didn’t give a fuck. The bride and groom were all about love. Love does not save, but it feels so deep damn good.

August 15, 2016

He drove his rusted out, smashed-in pickup truck to the local fruit stand, parked, and took fifteen minutes to get out of the truck and order some cantaloupes. He was in his mid-seventies, short, as wide as he was tall, and he wore a see through straw hat and overalls. He leaned heavily on a cane. There were three teeth in his mouth.

Then he insisted on carrying his own melons to the truck, climbed aboard and cursed as the vehicle wouldn’t start. Cathy from the stand used jumper cables to give his truck a jump, and the engine roared to life. As soon as Cathy disconnected the cables, the truck died again.

“I’m sorry, hon, your truck is dead,” Cathy said.

“Oh, that’s all right. I git me a taxi I reckon.”

But he didn’t call a taxi. He stood in the heat and watched us hopefully, until Cathy asked me to drive him in her car to the Do Drop Inn, a beer and meat joint (all you can eat pork chops) on Route 109, just south of Jerseyville. He said his trailer was next to there, and the boys at the Do Drop, though they didn’t like him, would help him.

So I drove him. I cranked up the air conditioning. He smelled of alcohol.

“I guess I need to quit drivin’ regular trucks,” Lonnie said, “start driving my lawn mower.”

I told him about Alvin Straight, about whom a movie, “the Straight Story,” was made, when Straight, unable to drive anymore, drove his riding lawn mower from Iowa to Northern Minnesota and back again, to visit his dying brother (played by Harry Dean Stanton).

We drove four miles in silence, then Lonnie said, “Iowa all the way to Minnesota and back again. If that don’t beat all. Iowa Minnesota – huh. His brother?”

I said I guessed he needed a new truck. He said, No, no, my truck break down like that every couple of weeks. He said consider the lilies of the field, God would take care of him, when in fact Gene, God’s unlikely minion, was taking care of him.

And so it went to the Do Drop Inn, the parking lot of which was half filled with the trucks of afternoon beer drinkers.

“Oh my lord,” Lonnie said, “how am I git out this here small vehicle.” We were sitting in Cathy’s full size van. “Can you give me a hand them cantaloupes?”

I carried the huge melons into the bar, which was so dark I couldn’t see the interior. Lonnie trailed behind, way behind, the tripod of his feet and cane barely holding upright.

A voice from the bar said, “Lonnie comin’? Put down the stuff. I got it from here.”

Lonnie came into the entrance and said, “Hello, guys! How you?”

The voice answered, “Set down, Lon. Somebody take you home.”

A chorus in the dark tavern (why are taverns so dark in the afternoon?) said, “Lon.”

“Boys,” Lonnie said. He shook my hand, his palm sweating. “Thank you kindly the ride. Iowa to Minnesota, I will remember that. I forgit your name.”

I had told him my name four times as we drove.

“Gene,” I said.

August 12, 2016

I fell in love with Paul Jacobson the minute my family moved to Alton. We were very different, but we shared the same wicked sense of humor in which nothing – not Jesus, not anything – was sacred.

Jake was into weight lifting back then, and he was a specimen. I’ve never lifted anything heavier than a beer. We roamed the open spaces inside Alton, a town where everything is steep hills and deep ravines in which houses couldn’t be built. We navigated using a series of trails through woods and weeds, where earlier explorers had left their mark. We watched people across their back yards who had no idea we were there. We picked wild blackberries, cutting our bare arms on the thorns and scratching bloody our legs, from chiggers. And Jake’s mom, a mom among moms, made us blackberry pies.

We made each other laugh. I thought Jake was crazy, and maybe he was. He got a kick out of being an outsider. My own introverted soul was very comfortable with him. We would lie on the ground and watch the stars and laugh as though we were identical twins. We didn’t know it then: We both were philosophers.

We had the same type of fathers – bullies and terrorists. My dad was the angriest human I have ever known. I didn’t dare fight back. Jake’s dad didn’t dare threaten his son – Jake had “don’t fuck with me” eyes.

We took a dislike to the same phony people, and in one instance we took revenge on a teacher, the method of which was highly successful, though the teacher and the school – they didn’t know we were the perps – were out a thousand dollars or more.

And then we graduated, and as Betty Ball, our classmate said on the day of graduation, “Well, Baldwin, this is the last day we’re all equals.” Man, was she right. And Jake and I went our separate ways. And I didn’t see him again for fifty years.

Then came our reunion this past June, and Jake and I locked eyes and started laughing because the room was full of phonies as well dear friends, and we resumed a conversation that had the longest ellipsis in history.

“Man, this room is full of old people,” Jake said in wonderment.

You are reading this, so you know what happened to me, a life in the arts. Meanwhile, Dr. Paul Jacobson had been a professor of sociology at a university in Tennessee. We were smarter than we may have appeared, in high school.

Two weeks ago, Jake, a lifelong healthy food advocate, a lifelong athlete – he loves tennis – told his tennis pals that he was having trouble breathing. They kidded him about him being so damned healthy and fit and now he was going to need a stent. They were wrong.

Jake met with a heart specialist and was shocked by what that doctor, in consultation with partners, told him. He was going to have to have open heart surgery the next morning. He was in dire peril of being killed by a “widow maker.”

The good part, Jake told me, was that he didn’t have several weeks to brood about it or call friends in fear that they’d hold prayer circles for him. He didn’t have to worry about me, on that score.

He had double bypass surgery the next day, about ten days ago, and he is alive and well, having been told by the heart specialist that he had to adapt the Mediterranean diet, which Jake has already been on since junior high school. Heart disease runs in his family.

My first thought, upon hearing the news, was a selfish one. I didn’t want my friend to die because I needed him. My further thoughts took me back in the Circle Game to when Jake and I were philosophers and star men and teenage sex fiends (sorry, E. and B. and C. and the naked redheaded girl in the bathtub at the youth building at Main Street Methodist Church).

We talked this morning. We comforted each other. We laughed. We’ve both read “Candide;” we know the truth. Literature could have ended with Voltaire; he said everything there is to say about men.

We laughed. And we’ll keep laughing. We plan to be the last two standing from the Class of 1966. But you know what they say about plans.