-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

September 24, 2015

This has been a stressful time for me. I bought a house, and the ensuing paperwork and details are mind-numbing. The thought of moving gives me stomach pain. This morning alone, I got six phone calls related to the purchase. So how to find peace, and not succumb to a panic attack, and ignore the right wing bigots currently dominating public discourse, and stay sane?

This morning, the four sipping stations of my hummingbird feeder were occupied by four dog-eye sulfur butterflies, elegant in billowing yellow and eye-spotted wings. They didn’t glide to the feeder as much as float, wings rising and falling and filling with breeze, cream yellow parachutists.

Rubythroated hummingbirds approached the feeder in a line, like planes awaiting landing at an airport. Normally, they attack interlopers, but the butterflies seemed to confuse them—hence the eyespots. What a miracle is evolution, a timeless thing of elegance and persistence.

Honeybees also fed, ceding territory to no other creatures. Some of them crawled into the sipping ports, a couple of them drowned in sugar water. I have a jar of locally produced honey in my kitchen; I approve of bees even though I’m allergic. The birds and butterflies gave wide birth to the hungry honeybees.

Fall is a somnolent time, an extended nap for the natives, to fatten and energize for the coming winter. Fall is a furious time for migrating souls anxious to fill up and pump up and bulk up for thousand mile journeys.

For house buyers.

Sound is crisp and sharp: the crackle of the browning grasses, the brittleness of the turning leaves, the dry whir of grasshopper wings, the violin scrape of crickets, the ricochet of falling acorns.

The hottest day is dry and dreamy. The weirdest games debut: nut kicking, leaf catching, puff ball squeezing, frog belly scratching, praying mantis petting.

I will rake my own leaves, shovel my own snow, grow my own vegetables, sit on my own porch, listen to the wind in the corn across the highway, be naked, hug my own trees. If I live to next week.

Embrace it all or crawl under the blankets—either way, time is not flying is flying.

September 17, 2015

On the Genehouse walk this morning, I saw an orange Godfrey maintenance truck pull off the highway and stop. A guy with a grey Harpo Marx hairdo climbed out, grabbed a shovel, and scooped up the very ripe body of an unrecognizable varmint. He tossed the body inside the truck bed.

“You’ve got the sexy job, I said. “Oh, that ain’t nothin’.” The guy pointed. In the truck bed was a dead fawn, a flattened possum, two cats, a headless dog, two blacksnakes, a mangled box turtle and three stiff raccoons. I nearly wretched at the putrid smell, but the truck driver took it in stride.

I once did a theater residency in a small northern Illinois town. A woman there invited me to a party. She was selling raccoon penis bone necklaces as gag gifts. The ladies at the party sipped fruity wine and whispered “penis bone” over and over. Male raccoons, it seems, have penis bones, and with the right permit you can harvest the road kill and fashion the hollow bones into jewelry. This woman was grossing five thousand dollars a year selling penis parts.

Norma K. was the first girl aside from my mom to see my boneless penis. She opened the business by pulling down her shorts (we were five), revealing what to me was a mysterious fissure. She was way ahead of her time: If social media is to be believed, everyone under the age of thirty has shaved their pudenda. If social media is to be believed, every male over thirty would give good money to have a hollow bone inserted into his penis.

I watched “Nature” on PBS last night, about sage grouse mating on the western prairie. Most animals only mate once a year. The males are highly motivated—or else they masturbate once a year, who knows. Continue reading →

September 13, 2015

Try to remember the unveiling of the Miles Davis statue, more than a thousand people, all colors of people, all there to honor one of the greatest musicians of all time. The justly proud Preston Jackson, sculptor of the masterpiece, the beaming committee of folks who made the event possible.

Try to remember the folks of whom I asked the question: Why are you here? Oh, said the woman holding the biography of Miles. I just started reading this. I’m reluctant, because I know his personal life was complicated. But his music . . . oh. Oh, said Jules, an eccentric man with his accordion file of photos of famous people and their autographs in his arms, I am here because Miles was great—the greatest. Do you have a card? I collect cards. This is St. Louis, said the young bearded man standing with his red tee-shirted border collie, I couldn’t miss this. Because, said the middle-aged woman in the large hat, he was a great genius. His music was absolutely the emotional core of the meaning of life. And the twin little boys hugging Miles’ statue around the only part they could reach: the bronze bellbottoms.

Try to remember the speeches. Bobby Shew the great trumpeter, improvising words with the audience. You should be proud, he said to the audience. And I am humbled to be here. Preston Jackson, master sculptor: I will return here over and over to this wonderful place of history. The mayor of East St. Louis who spoke in gospel mode: This is a great day. The sun came out at the moment this ceremony began. The mayor of Alton: This crowd is what American looks like.

Try to remember Miles Davis project member Pete Basola, beaming onstage next to Bobby Shew and just in front of drummer Montez Coleman, holding his sax and madly happy to sit in and play. Bobby Shew immaculately dressed in a suit, having not played his horn for weeks because of two carpal tunnel operations, firing off sixteenth notes with seeming ease, bursts of color and throbbing and glissando sex. Montez Coleman bent over his drums and smiling, his bassist playing standup as if it were a guitar, and the keyboardist watching Bobby and laughing: hot, baby, and the music was all Miles, all the time, and we were all turning kind of blue.

Try to remember the band sitting outdoors, the night fifty degrees cool, man, Bobby Shew saying, “I’m freezing my ass off,” the collective crowd head bouncing up and down, the little girl on her father’s lap, buried in a blanket but her left foot tapping the beat, Bobby hugging me at the end and calling me ‘brother,’ the conversations of strangers over our common bond, liquid music.

Try to remember Alton’s greatest night, Alton looking American and fit and artsy and brotherhood and sisterhood abounding, and watts of smiles, and cries of devotion, oh please let this never end.

Try to remember the kind of September when kind of blue dreams were kept beside our pillows

And follow.

September 9, 2015

Last night I had the strangest dream. Marty Luthie King, a hillbilly from Tennessee appeared to me and foretold the future.

“Gene, I have a dream—and since y’all are dreaming, that makes it a dream within a dream. Extra Large Kim—that is her name, ELK for short . . . will emerge from a jail cell and lead us to the Promised Land. Meanwhile, Governor Mike Hicklebee will take her place in that old Kentucky jail. He will fast and live on his fat for two years.

“And Extra Large Kim will dance to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and praise White Jesus. And homosexuals will tremble, because ELK is not afraid to call a spade a spade and a homo a homo and a liberal a traitor and a Jew a Christ killer and an Episcopalian the Auntie Christ.

“It is time that the Extra Large Pasty People get their due. It is time that we retreat into the Stone Age, when there was no science, no global anything, when ‘gay’ meant happy-go-lucky, not hippy-go-lucky, Continue reading →

September 5, 2015

There were hugs all around today as Mike and Cathy’s produce stand closed, the last of the tomatoes were sold and the last melons went into back car seats. The record rains of June ensured produce disaster, drowning seedling crops, rotting peach tree roots and apple trees, filling ripe fruit with yellow coloring and spotting.

Apples should be coming, not going. Tomatoes were around last October, and I was sad then. But everything is gone today. Tonight, it’s drive to the grocery store for stony tomatoes from California then Mexico, where there are much less rigorous pesticide laws.

Fruits and vegetables are not nostalgia. They are the reason my generation will be the longest lived in history. A nurse friend of ours Continue reading →

September 4, 2015

I live with my ex-husband and my daddy. Daddy be ninety soon. The ex, he is eighty, seventeen years older than me. People when they hear that say, “Oh, my.”

We got married long ago in a Baptist church, but the ex had a wild hair up his butt. I did not know there for awhile, and then the minister’s wife, she told me, “Your husband got a wild hair up his butt—somebody got to tell you.”

You know what I mean by “wild hair?” Do I need to be graphic? So I told him, “Bye-bye, dickhead.”

And twenty-three years passed. By then the woman old Dickhead catted with was dead. She had sucked him dry every which way. And then she died to spite him. I guess.

And wouldn’t you know it, he come crawlin’ back to me and Daddy. Say he is lonely; he is so sorry—the hussy just wanted his money. What money? He never held on to no money.

I let him move back in. He told people it was love, and I held my tongue—a miracle by its ownself. He tried to marry me again—Dickhead—but I done learned my lesson on that subject. He protested, said we would be livin’ in sin, and I said okay by me. In case any more wild hairs growed back up his butt.

I got the house in my name; he is ailin’, and I got power of attorney. Oh yes. My momma didn’t raise no idiots.

Mommy? I get my mouth from her. She used to sit on a barstool, call ever’body around her “Ass-bite.” “Hey, Ass-bite, how y’all?” “Oh, Ass-bite, you done made your bed, now lay in it.” “Ass-bite, you a ugly sum bitch.”

Her friends’d wait for her to go pee in the Ladies, and they’d switch her beer from Pabst to somethin’ inferior, Stag and such. She couldn’t tell no difference, always told the bartender give her half a glass a beer; she drank a lot a halves. And do not be tellin’ her that two halves make a whole.

She called me “Ass-bite.” “Ass-bite, do the dishes.” “Ass-bite, be back home by eleven.” And such. She never called Daddy “Ass-bite,” though. He’d sit and drink his full glass a beer, watch the pool players.

I cannot prove it, but I bet Daddy never spoke five hundred words his whole life. He said, “Marry me,” of course—to Mommy—and four hundred, ninety-eight other words.

Get your gal pals in one place and talk about marriage then. Mine all wish they was livin’ in sin, own the house, got power of attorney over their Dickheads.

Got my mouth from Mommy, my good looks from Daddy, my brains from my own self.

August 31, 2015

I am in total fake outrage, as is my brother, Ohio politician John Boehner over the audacity of Obama to rename Mt. McKinley to Mt. Denali. How dare that Kenyan black man honor a defeated race, Indians by naming a mountain after one of their heathen spirits.

Never mind that McKinley had no interest in Alaska much less its mountains. Never mind that Indians (synonym: losers) have called the mountain Denali for centuries. Never mind that even his wife didn’t want to mount McKinley.

I am fakely ashamed and fakely mortified at political correctness which says we tighty whities slaughtered Indians and enslaved blacks—get over it! I mean, you’ve got casinos and the NBA—what more do you want?

Fakely, I’m amazed they’ll probably blow up Mount Rushmore because two of the men carved in stone owned some slaves and one of them, a guy named Jefferson, dallied with black Sally and ordered George Rogers Clark to terrorize Indians. It was the times, man!

Heck, there are more Indians today than there were in the heathen times when red savages scalped white women. And blacks are growing in numbers as white women announce they are African Americans. And white men like actor James Whitmore are walking around with their faces smeared in black shoe polish to be “black like me.”

Did you hear, beloved Cardinals baseball manager Whitey Herzog is changing his name to Caucasian Herzog to assuage Ferguson? Did you hear Obama is renaming the Mississippi River to the Malcom X River? Did you hear Donald Trump is leading the Republican race to the presidency and that pigs are flying?

Did you see the fake MTV Video Awards last night? Did you see the interracial partial nudity, the interracial kissing and twerking, the fake sex acts and Miley with a pink balloon over her vagina? Iggy Azalea saying “Y’all” with a fake black accent?

Oh, fake me, white Jesus, “take me home to the place I belong” (Germany, Poland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Serbia and Montenegro).

I am fake sick to my stomach, fake panic attacked, fake the victim of black racism toward white old men. The globe isn’t the only thing that’s warming.

Fake up, white America.

August 30, 2015

Rose got married yesterday in the gazebo of the Rose Garden at Gordon Moore Park. There was an acre of roses of every description and color, including Rose the bride in her fabulous white wedding dress. Lorenzo, the groom wore a blue, open-sleeved, suit coat extended to his knees, a look I hugely admired and wished I owned such a coat.

As with everything in my life, I arrived to Rose and Lorenzo’s wedding an hour early so that I could pace and get one hundred per cent nervous owing to my utter awkwardness as a human being.

This was especially helpful, as the day was overcast with about eighty-five percent humidity. So I was sweating buckets well before the ceremony. My armpits soaked my black dress shirt, and my back grabbed the shirt and tried to drown it.

Then there were the black slacks. I bought them for the occasion without trying them on, as I know I wear a thirty-four length pant, but the slacks were thirty-two, there were no thirty-fours, and I wasn’t about to go to another store, so I reasoned that two inches wasn’t a big deal—which is why my cuffs hung above my shoe tops and made me look like Gomer Pyle.

So: I was the man in black in short pants and squeaky black shoes. All around me were family, friends of the family, some dressed to the nines, a few in blue jeans, all toweling themselves off with handkerchiefs against the humidity. Continue reading →

August 28, 2015

Shovelhead did time several times, for various offenses. If he got mad, he’d pull a gun and posture. He never actually shot anybody. He got in a lot of fights, including one in which a man tried to brain him with a shovel.

In jail, Shovelhead learned the art of tattooing. First, he had another tattooist fill the canvass of his visible body. He even had his nickname, “Shovelhead” tattooed across his caved-in forehead. He sports a graying mustache that hangs half a foot on each side of his mouth.

And he is as sweet as a man can be. But he figured out that women weren’t that turned on by an ex-con with his name tatted in Old English script across his beveled forehead and a grey, droopy mustache. And he isn’t a good dresser. Cutoff sweat pants, sleeveless tees and cowboy boots and a rolled up straw hat is his dress-up outfit.

He started collecting female mannequins; his house is full of them. He dressed them up and called them company. Continue reading →