-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

June 19, 2016

I came out of Joe K.’s restaurant and gasped from the heat. No Genehouse walk today, I thought, not when one could literally have a stroke on Stroke Hill. So keep your eyes peeled for happenings.

I walked towards my car. I saw an 80-ish elderly woman in white pants, struggling to get in the passenger seat of her daughter’s SUV. The step up was too high. She nearly fell backward. She grabbed the end of the swaying door and straddled it.

“What do you think you’re doing, Mom,” the daughter said.

“I’m fucking the car door,” the old lady replied. She pretended to hump the door. Her daughter broke out laughing. The daughter said, “When you’re done, I’ll drive you home.”

I had been going to stop and help, but I walked on by, climbed into my hot car and slammed the dashboard with both hands and laughed the snot out of me. And wrote down what I had just seen.

Back in the days when I was doing writing residencies for the Illinois Arts Council, I was sitting on a concrete park bench in Davenport, Iowa, another bench back to back and facing the Mississippi River. Two bowling ball-shaped old ladies in print dresses were seated behind me and commiserating.

“Oh,” Lady 1 said. “He is coming home from prison tomorrow. What the hell am I going to do with a ex con grandson?”

“Did he catch the AIDs?” Woman 2 asked.

“No,” but his balls . . .” I heard snickering. I sneaked a glance in time to see Woman 1 making croquet ball shapes with her hands. “I am not going near those things. They are so swole up, I don’t know. I seen the picture; the ball sack musta been a foot long. Has to shove it down one pants leg.”

“What’s he got?” her friend asked.

“Damned if I know. The prison doc said get him an appointment. What type of doctor looks at balls for a living?”

“Henry’s balls are low,” Woman 2 said, “but not that low.”

I happened to have a notebook with me. I copied down that dialogue word for word.

Advice to young writers: “Never have a character talk offstage.” Edward Albee “When in doubt, have a man with a gun in his hand come through the door.” Raymond Chandler “Write drunk, edit sober.” Ernest Hemingway. “Write down everything, even the silence. The silence is the smartest thing in the room.” Eugene Baldwin

June 5, 2116

The night was magic. The green had turned to black, the white to purple, and blue to pink. Bullfrogs sang to the placid river. A barge wended its way east to the lock and dam, its spotlight aimed at the bank. And shadow birds flew to rookeries and nests.

And in Alton, the Phil Dunlop Nonet played the entire “Birth of the Cool,” Miles Davis’ seminal album, at the Miles Davis Jazz Festival. Miles’ celebrated nonet included a French horn and tuba, and these brash young men from St. Louis faithfully recreated the sound, and the audience sat in rapt attention, ate chicken wings and potato salad, and drank beverages, and it was mellow and jumpy and diverse. I sat at a table with five beautiful women dressed to the nines, and I became sociable—for a spell. For a spell, I was not cynical, not worried about politics.

Last night on the drive home, I was pure string theory, and infinite notes swelled out to the river, swelled across my arms and chest, and the chorus of insects improvised and the night hawks sang.

I stood in the yard and listened to Ruby Puppy sing the alarm from the farm across the highway, her frenetic barks warning raccoons and coyotes: No trespassing. The hyperactive mockingbird in the spruce tree trilled its own version of “Birth of the Cool,” playing all the solos, and I counterpointed, and the bird flew close, and we improvised.

The universe sings like a tuning fork, a resonating echo that early man tried to imitate with flutes of bone. All sound is music. The deer huffs and blows out its cheeks like Dizzy, the rabbit whines soprano, the rattlesnake plays its own percussion, the cattle sing low, the trees are cellos, the stones are drummers, the sleeping babies hum, the window fan whirs, the June bugs are bassists, the owls sing scat, our hearts are tender drums.

Only humans play songs of regret, songs of loss, spirituals to an unknown God, for human music possesses knowledge, and there is the origin of blues.

On Ozark porches, fiddles and guitars; on stages, electric glide of keyboards and Fenders and trumpets and horns; in symphony halls, cascades and glissandos of chords, the dreams of Bach and Hindemith; in hospices, the music of harps: this I imagined last night, standing in the dark and listening. Listening is the truest seeing.

The night was soulful, soundful, sentient.

The night was magic.

May 27, 2016

You know my secret to a long life? Ciggies, and caffeine, and moonshine. Ciggies’ll hurt you, caffeine bad for you. Propaganda, you ask me. I got some jars a Kentuck moonshine in the kitchen. I don’t tell my docs about moonshine—none of they goddamn business. Well, am I settin’ here? Am I alive?

Old age is a bitch. Ain’t it? I will be ninety in June, still farmin’, still drivin’—hell, still livin’! I have had five heart attacks the last three months. I died three times. How many times y’all done died? Me—three. They told me prepare for my maker, I wasn’t going to make it. I had two pneumonies. I think the pneumonies was the worst.

The eyes are goin,’ though. Aw hell, they want to operate on my eyeballs. Say they have to wait until six months after my pacemaker settles in. Hell, I ain’t scared. Scratch them eyeballs! I won’t need eyes in heaven.

Or hell.

I got nice neighbors across the road. Man and woman. Oh, they give me barbeque, lottsa other things, cookies. Ever’ evenin’, I walk out on the road and stare at they house. And somebody always come out and talk to old Ethelbert. I figured out: They alternate. Wife-husband-wife again. They don’t mind, but they shore do take turns.

My kids say, Pop, you are a loud talker sumbitch. Don’t swear, do not scratch yerself in front a yer grandkids. Hide that moonshine. Ast you, how else a kid get they education?

Shee-it, I can stop a party in its tracks with my stories. I have died three times, trucked bootleg hooch and ciggies from Chicago to Alton in the Depression, me a kid in the back of the truck, carryin’ a pistol and brandishin’ it more than once. I had to sap a guy with the pistol near Joliet, once. He got curious and peeped in the back, and I conked him with my Colt.

I shoulda been a writer.

There is a price to pay for bein’ named Ethelbert. Drop the ‘bert,’ and what you got? ‘Ethel honey, won’t you hold my hand?’ ‘Ethel, you play jump rope with the rest of the gals.’ I had to beat down some boys back in the day. My daddy taught me to fight. He bar-fought regular.

This here century too tame for me. I git along but I don’t like it much. Now I wear a collar around my neck, walk on a leash like a dog, my daughter walks me. One these days, I am gone take a piss on a fire hydrant. See how she like that. Shee-it, I just eat and sleep and excrete. I am harmless.

Well, if a pretty gal’d just set on my lap, I wouldn’t say no. Hell’s bells, if a ugly gal sat on my lap, I wouldn’t say no.

May 24, 2016

She stood ahead of me at the convenience store counter, 6:30 a.m., and ten minutes went by as she tried to remember what it was she wanted. Cigarettes—no. Lottery tickets—no. Little Debbie snacks—no. How much is a pint of cherry whiskey—no. She stood on tiptoes and tapped the various lottery options with her right index finger.

She was thirty going on seventy, but her body was that of a little girl. She wore sandals and Capri pants, and she obsessively scratched the backs of calves with the shoes, and blood trails and scabs ran down.

She kept looking back at me, but I don’t think she saw me. She wasn’t being rude; she was sick. All I wanted to buy was my newspaper and a coffee. But I waited. And I watched.

The meth mom trembled and tore at her straw-colored blond hair. She clenched her buttocks over and over. She shook her hands rapidly, as though she had no feeling in her hands. Her face was chiseled, drawn, taut, and her eyes fluttered. Her skin was the color of porcelain.

She talked about her babies, at home with Grandma. Oh, right, she needed four sodas—babies, her, grandma. She looked back towards the soda machine, chewing on her cheeks as if she were making a momentous decision. Maybe she was afraid she’d lose her place in line. I was the line.

The clerk is a gentle woman. She takes in strays. Three kids live with her who are not her blood in addition to her own four. She judges not. And she listened to the meth mom with fill attention.

Finally, the woman bought three kinds of lottery tickets, a can of chewing tobacco and some beef jerky. She turned to me and said, “Sorry.” She ran, not walked to her car.

I paid for my sundries. The clerk looked at me and shook her head. The store is the preferred location for all-day drunks, meth addicts, heroin users and an occasional person in a suit who wants coffee on the go.

The store is the neo-Harry Hope’s Bar, from Eugene O’Neil’s masterpiece “The Iceman Cometh.” I am the Jason Robards character, Hickey, without the sell and the pitch and the promise of better days.

I walked outside. The meth woman was in her car, windows closed, cigarette lit, loud music banging, and she pounded the dashboard with her bony hands.

I don’t mind the addicts. I do mind the massive if inadvertent child abuse. Many houses and trailers of my valley are filled with misery. The schools are filled with brain-addled children. The sum total of dreams of a future in these places could fit in a sinkhole.

Within that greater sink hole, “Sorryland,” where hamburger joint uniforms outnumber street clothes, where long haul truckers ride high and high, where no one votes, gives a fuck about nature, where plastic bags hang from trees like Christmas ornaments, and where, if our soldiers could see this they would not fight for such a land.

The meth mom fired up her car and pulled away, burning rubber and nearly hitting my vehicle. She ran the stop sign and trusted God not to pulverize her on the highway.

She probably shouted “sorry” all the way home.

May 22, 2016

A brown thrasher has taken up residence in my yard, to the delight of Scout the Cat, and to the admiration of me. The brown thrasher is the state bird of Georgia, and no wonder. It is an entertainment unto itself.

Thrashers are related to catbirds and mockingbirds. They sing less manically than do mockingbirds, but they mimic other birds and are not shy. No, they do not sing with a Southern accent.

The name matches their MO. Thrashers thrash, through undergrowth, grass, dead leaves, flinging the impediments in the air and snatching up seeds, worms, spiders, beetles. They scurry like robins. And they are fearless. See the YouTube videos of baby brown thrashers gulping down whole garter snakes.

Our thrasher is rust-colored, with white piping on its wings, a speckled breast, a long rudder-like tail and a straight thorn-shaped beak. I suspect that a nest is nearby. I put out some peanuts and strawberry tops, and the thrasher grabbed it all.

At the old house, I had the Carolina Wren Kid, who tore my welcome mat to pieces and used it for nesting material. The Kid thought nothing of hopping onto a window sill and going beak to nose with the cat, through the window screen.

(It would be nice to meet a woman who has thrasher characteristics and sings beautifully. I could use a good thrashing. I’m just saying.)

There are at least twenty bird species along my bluff ridge, swallows and bats and songbirds and bluebirds and vultures and robins and crows and blue herons and great white and snowy egrets and chickadees and nuthatches and black-capped sparrows and hummingbirds and peregrine falcons and woodpeckers and eagles and sandpipers and ducks and owls and on and on. And now thrashers.

So, welcome to Genehouse, Thalia (Thalia the Greek goddess of entertainments, of course) the Thrasher. If you need extra towels or laundry done, let me know. I have a supply of soap and toothpaste. Please don’t eat my lizards, but if you do I forgive you in advance. I can’t speak for the lizards. Let me know your favorite fruit.

Oh, and that feline in the window with the reptilian grin? Don’t show off your children to her, and don’t let her babysit.

May 21, 2016

I sat sleepless in the dark livingroom last night, 1 a.m. A prolonged wail rose up from the field across from my front yard. I took my glass of wine and sat on the front porch step, and listened. An occasional car sped by on the highway. The wail stopped.

=It might have been fifty degrees out; it felt quite chilly and exhilarating. I wore jeans and a black tee shirt, and I was barefoot.  It was cold enough that there were no insect noises.

The yard and fields beyond were lit by a three quarter moon, and the starlight through the leafed out branches of the creaking trees seemed like Morse code signals, dot-dot-dash. For some reason, I thought of Tennessee Williams, of “Stella” standing longingly and watching the moon. And then I remembered that baby Stella, the daughter of my neighbors, had seen me in the afternoon and held out her chubby arms and let me hold her: Stella by sunlight.

And one more light appeared, a tiny pulse on and off, moving west to east just above turned soil. It was a firefly or Tinkerbell, one or the other. A May firefly would be a pioneer, appearing long before its cousins, before the summer heat. If it was looking for a girlfriend, it was flat out of luck.

I heard a slight commotion coming from my side porch area. It sounded like muffled squeaking. And then they appeared to me, a mother skunk and three fluffy, mewling babies, walking in a straight line, past me to the brush pile and on in. They had been on an adventure—if skunks have adventures. I had smelled skunk the night before, so I wasn’t too surprised and

shadows creep and

“whooo-ahhhhh!” a barred owl and “whew!” the skunks and

farm dogs barks and the echo makes more canines bark chain-erupting all the way north and the cell tower near Airport Road blinks on the horizon and

“whew” the people of Earth and

field mice scamper in the moonlight and redheaded woodpeckers snooze in holes beak-drilled in the tops of utility poles and bobcats crawl on their bellies and coyotes chew their tails and drunks tell their tales and all-night poker players watch for tells and drug sells on Third Street and lunacy (lyrical lacy lascivious lollipop guild) and then

we sleep.

May 20, 2016

This afternoon Farmer Orville and I sat on his wrap-around front porch and drank Dr. Pepper and enjoyed the cool breezes. Ruby Puppy hunted snakes and Reba ran onto the steps and tried to lick us, her belly reeking of dead carcass. “There is a dead mole in the north pasture,” my friend said. “She’s been rollin’ on it. There are also two fields of ripe strawberries, less one quart which I picked for supper.

The barn was rocking with mother swallows flying in and out the massive doors in search of food for the kiddies, the barn cats sitting on the ground and batting at the birds like they were ping pong balls.

It was a schizophrenic day, up and down, clouds and sun, heat and chill. It has rained so much, frantic lawn mowers mow in patches between cloud bursts. I have joined that select club, and I dutifully if not enthusiastically got behind Old Blade and marched and mowed the front hills.

I saw something move in my peripheral vision—not that unusual in folks who suffer from depression. I often see shades and shapes and tell myself it is okay. This something, though, moved across my field of vision again. It was an animal, low to the ground. I silently swore and took a good look. The creature jumped through my roses then turned and faced me. It was Scout the Cat.

Scout the Cat has never been outside, unless you count me holding her on the front porch and her begging to get back inside. But here she was prancing around and smelling the roses. She had opened the front storm door with a paw and made her debutante’s appearance, and now she was having second thoughts. She had seen me use the latch to open the door, and she discovered that she could rise up on her hind feet, extend her right paw and push the mechanism.

I will never know if she had planned this lam. Was she running away to a source of better cat food, following a modified carnal urge, wanting to eat the dancing hummingbirds that tortured her at their feeder in front of the window, hoping to travel to New York for the funeral of the great “cigarette-and-whisky-voiced” Morley Safer?

I was officially enrolled into Lindenwood University today. It just costs ten thousand bucks, with the senior discount. I have been wavering at the thought of returning to school, where scads of scantily clad coeds wander the quads, and me, I’m the grandpa, the Old Man and the See. I called my old DePaulUniversity advisor, Morrie Fiddler and asked his opinion. “What the fuck are you waiting for,” Morrie said.

Good question. I’ve been waiting for sixty-eight years, or nine cat years. My theory of everything includes the belief that the right woman would appear and walk through my house, that I would be discovered—to hell with a literary agent—rather than showing my stuff around and that God would just step down out of the clouds and shout, “People of Earth!”

That last fanciful bit just might come true as (S)trump(et) struts sassily toward victory with the help of the National Rifle Asses.

After all, pigs didn’t fly, but cats opened doors, ancient mariners signed up for knowledge, and “strawberry fields forever.”

May 14, 2016

In 1842, writer Charles Dickens made the first of two trips to the United States, with St. Louis being the furthest west city he visited. (There is a fanciful “Bonanza” TV episode in which Dickens is represented as having visited the Ponderosa and joking with Hoss.)  He and his wife traveled down the Ohio River then up the Mississippi.

Along the voyage, Dickens stopped at Cairo, Illinois and visited The Looking Glass Prairie thirteen miles inland. He found Cairo and environs to be swampy, mosquito infested, humid and depressing.

Upon his return to England, Dickens wrote an excoriating book, “American Notes,” in which he lambasted the American character as boastful, vain, dirty and meretricious, tobacco spitting, whisky swilling and all-around cunning in an evil sort of way. (This was fueled in part by his rage at American publishers outright stealing his serialized novels for newspapers.)

Dickens’ next novel was “Martin Chuzzlewit.” A young made man of the English aristocracy disappoints his greedy grandfather and is exiled to vile New York, where Martin (like his literary counterpart Candide) is fleeced every which way. He uses the last of his money to purchase land in “Eden,” a land development a thousand miles west, only to find that his property is a disease-ridden swamp. In other words, “Eden” is Cairo, Illinois.

America went nuts—in a bad way. Dickens was denounced, his books were burned, his personal wealth was depleted, and he became extremely depressed. And he made his second journey to St. Louis, this time genuinely impressed by the changes in the counrty.

All this I write to suggest that one Donald J. Trump is a character out of Dickens; a braggart, misogynist, cunning, conning, satire of a real person. Dickens liked villainous names; in the case of “Martin Chuzzlewit,” if was Seth Pecksniff. Tom Pinch is the hapless man of good moral character.

Let us give Trump a name he deserves: Donald J. Harrumph, Donald Conniver, Donald Ladyskirt, Trump Triumph Baldman, Rumptrump Racebaiter—you get the idea. And you can play along.

Make no mistake: Trump is a satire of a businessman, a caricature of capitalism, a bloviating miscreant—and most of all, completely aware and in control of, his theatrics. Millions of disenfranchised white people are string puppets dancing to the Donald. And they will win—if you do not vote.

It is one thing to smile at villainy Dickens-style. Villainy in a book is “fun-fun-fun till Daddy takes the T-Bird away.” Seth Pecksniff is a hoot. Donald Trump is a miserable, jactating, sumbitch excuse for a human being, and he wants to shove his will up our collective asses.

“His high spiced wares were made to sell, and they sold; and his thousands of readers could as rationally charge their delight in filth upon him, as a glutton can shift upon his cook the responsibility of his beastly excess.”  “Martin Chuzzlewit”

Thus endeth the lesson.