-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

Four years ago, I was invited by a teacher at a local Godfrey elementary school to give talks about my Native American artifacts. The teacher visited my house—he had seen my website and knew I had presented artifacts in schools for twenty years—and picked up some artifacts I was donating, to decorate the science classroom.

A couple of weeks went by, no word about the date I was supposed to visit the school, so I called the teacher back. He said the event was cancelled. Why? A parent (or parents), he told me, had advised the principal I was controversial and not fit to influence children. The several thousand kids I worked with over the years will be surprised to hear this. (So far as I know, not one of them became a Marxist after being with me.)

Later, a woman I knew whose kid went to that school told me that some parent had read a Genehouse Chronicle and was offended. What did that have to do with artifacts? I attempted to meet with the principal, to no avail. Blacklisting almost always leads to obfuscation. So I told the teacher to give back the artifacts. He said, well you donated them. Not to a school which censors people, I said. He returned the stones.

I was reminded of my experience by a newspaper article published this morning, “The next front in culture war: public libraries.” A matronly woman named Bonnie Wallace in Llano County Texas is advocating parental control over public libraries. (Most of her acolytes don’t even have a library card.) She sent out an email, the title of which was “Pornographic Filth at the Llano Library.” A fellow conservative wrote back: “God has been so good to us … Please continue to pray for the librarians and that their eyes would be open to the truth.” Then the moron governor of Texas, Greg Abbott joined the cause, and the collective call became, end public libraries. Then county commissioners ended the library’s E-book program.

Now new county board elections are being held, and Democrats are being thrown out, including Dr. Richard Day, who has a master’s degree in library science and manages a rare book collection. The new conservative board (all Republican, all women) has noted that it will consult with a local Christian school for guidance. Their closed meetings, which are against the law in Texas, feature praying. They are seriously waiting for the Lord to answer, which may take a while.

(Note to you silent Christians: when will you get the balls to counter conservatism in the name of White Jesus? This same silence is why racism is the rallying cry of Republicans.)

On the woman’s filth list are “Between the World and Me,” the brilliant tome by Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Caste,” the masterful book by Isabel Wilkerson, and “In the Night Kitchen,” by Maurice Sendak. (The first two authors are Black, but that’s just “coincidence.”) There are fifty-eight other titles. The fate of the list is being decided in closed sessions (of course) so that reporters can’t quote the Christian rebels who are protecting their kiddies from filth, Communism, sex, critical race theory, etc.

I don’t know about you, but I was a voracious reader as a kid. My tastes included “dirty” books such as “Candy,” a sex-drenched parody of “Candide” which Voltaire would have loved, “Catch 22,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and Ayn Rand’s book of masturbation for teenage boys, “Fountainhead.” Hell, I was even turned on by actor Hayley Mills in “The Parent Trap,” where she had a scene in chaste underpants. These did not lead me to degradation or depravity or rape—unless playing with oneself is self-rape. (The greatest porno is in the Bible. I attended a wedding where the best man read a passage, the one about ‘your breasts are like honeydew melons,’ and the best man cracked up and laughed until he shook.)

I am not as important as a library; I just got a taste of the New World order. However, at any time I fully expect my scarlet letter. Or worse.

Margaret Atwood, no mere fictionist, is a prophet. Soon, her books will be banned, and she will be a silent prophet. Or worse.

Slit

ferocious lightning across

the Mississippi River

the distant long tree rows look

like fogged-in mountain ridges

the Missouri River rushing

toward the Confluence

I walk in a slit of no rain

rain on either side

the air viscous

my breaths labored heaves

clothes pasted with sweat and salt

mosquitoes lounge in the woods

waiting for the blood drive

their whines like tiny sirens

the slit of gurgling creek flooded

the color of coffee with cream,

three does watch me unafraid

“tock-tock” of chipmunks

sounding danger

cicadas waterlogged

and playing out of tune

a fat young man walking by me:

“I’m hunting the bear,

I got a score to settle.”

Bards

My friend Peggy Bevington has died. As with all my departed friends, I keep the name and address and phone number in a book, and soon the dead will outnumber the living.

Peggy lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park, devoting her life to teaching at the University of Chicago Lab School. She lived in a three-story brownstone on Blackstone Avenue with her husband David, a Shakespeare scholar at the U. of C. Their second floor was their bedroom, the third floor for graduate students who lived with them. (There is the wonderful and funny story of two grads, boyfriend, and girlfriend, who would come down the stairs for dinner carrying their own bottle of wine which they did not share with David and Peggy.)

The first floor was a feasting area. Food, of course, meat and casseroles and deserts, but books and more books piled on shelves, a grand piano (it seemed like half the faculty of the U. of C. could sit at that piano and crank out some show tunes or some Brahms, and their children the same), music stands and scores—David was a member of a string ensemble—a kitchen always pungent from David’s onion soup or Peggy’ roasts and hams and pies. The couple were positively Dickensian.

There was the New Year’s Eve party which began at five pm (Greenwich time, as they like to say) and my favorite, the Welcome Spring party at which friends and family and eminent scholars from the university and artists and authors such as Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski) would sing Beatles songs from hand-printed lyrics books, and a ragtag band led by Richard Pettingill on guitar would accompany. Young and old, people would leaf through their lyrics books and call out favorites.

On a New Year’s Eve five years ago, Peggy took me by the arm to the second floor. On her bed was a cardboard box and next to it another, larger square box. I opened them and gazed on perhaps a hundred Indian artifacts and a lump of flint core as big as a bowling ball. A teacher had given Peggy the artifacts when she was a child in Licking Creek, Ohio. Would I tell her what the objects were?

Halfway through my assessment, Peggy took a box and I another, and we went down into the party, and Peggy called for quiet, and everyone gathered around for what would be my hour-long lecture on the history of Indians. Only at a party with scholars would such a thing happen. After my explanation of each piece, Peggy said, “Gene this is my present to you.” People clapped. I cried. And those artifacts are in my house. One of them is a three-thousand- year-old granite pestle, hardly a rare find, but this pestle had words inked onto its bell from 1864. Which makes it invaluable. Two men walking in Licking Creek during the Civil War found the pestle and noted the find on the bell.

Peggy Bevington was brilliant, and a beloved mother and teacher. She and I became a sort of pipeline, some of her students at the Lab school becoming apprentice artists at Gallery 37, a massive summer arts program for teens in Chicago, some of those students coming to me and becoming playwrights, and some of them winning the Pegasus Theatres Young Playwrights Festival, me as their teacher becoming the winningest teacher in the history of the festival. Always, Peggy would be in the audience and cheer them on.

David Bevington was a rock star at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. He and Peggy invited me along one summer. The couple carried plastic Jewel bags laden with their possessions. They would sit on the ground on an island in the Stratford River, and an audience of groupies gathered and listened as David talked about the current Stratford productions, Peggy, who knew Shakespeare with the best of them correcting her husband when he uttered a wrong date or Bard fact. People would hand David copies of his books to autograph. They took me to their illegal swimming hole in a rock quarry which once a year was filled with plump elderly professors from the U. of C.

I must confess, I felt unworthy in the Bevington’s company, the hick from Alton, Illinois who was not raised to venerate art. They knew my feelings, and they poo-poohed my fears. David would read my play scripts and annotate them, never much editing, which they very much needed. Always, the notes were signed, “Love, David.”

David died last year, and Peggy remained in the brownstone. The obituary didn’t say how she died. They were the most in love couple I ever met, open and friendly and devoted to each other. I think Peggy died to meet up with David, but that’s just me.

The ghosts, the Bevington’s of Blackstone Street, I think, are like the ones in the film “Topper.” Friendly, assuring, watching over the new residents. An archeology dig at the house would reveal treasures of manuscripts and gewgaws.

I was their friend and their proud student. And love was in the air.

Finch Ascending, to the Abode of God

I was driving toward my house, signaling to turn into the driveway. The car windows were down. As I waited for an oncoming car to pass, two birds engaged in air combat crashed into my car, one flying off, the other flying through the window, hitting me in the chest, bouncing off the rearview mirror, and landing in my lap.

I made the turn and parked. In my lap was a female house finch. I picked up the tiny bird with her speckled breast, and cradled her in my right hand, and I stroked her with my trembling left index finger, her eyes meeting my eyes, until her eyes slightly rolled and closed, until she saw what the dead see. I cried.

I carried her to a limestone slab in my front yard and lay her on the cool surface dotted with 300,000,000-year-old fossils. On the telephone wire stretched across the yard, a line of finches perched and . . . watched? Was it my imagination, my anthropomorphism gone amuck, or my poet’s brush? Was I the sole the soul mourner?

Even if we and the birds were equals, the outcome is the same, the interpretation a work of science or a muse by Samuel Beckett. Or consider the poet Wendell Berry: “I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief… For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

There is no poem by a bird but there is a song.

All well and good, even comforting. But I held the bird in my hand, and I stroked her, her soft dotted belly, the tiny curled claws, the wings surrendered and folded like linens in a closet, our eyes meeting like fallen leaves meet Earth, and I felt her heartbeat wane and end, a grace note in the imagining of life.

I comforted her. Or: I comforted myself.

The Theory of Mind: “Human brains are tuned to try to understand other human’s intentions, thoughts and feelings. Specific regions of the brain contain populations of ‘mirror’ neurons . . . Unsurprisingly, these are the same regions of the brain that are active when a person is anthropomorphizing.” Emory University science website

The Theory of Mind, evolution, parallel universes, all the conjectures, the dark corridors in dreams, leading to oblivion, and nothing that happened happened. Nothing that did not happen did not happen. The meaning of a finch is wonder and song and color; the meaning of a finch is fiction.

For three days, the finch lay in state on the limestone slab. The ants and the flies were the first to the visitation and the feast. On the third night, she vanished. And rose to the Abode of God Which is Nothingness. On the limestone, a slight scuff mark of a decaying body leading to the edge, dragged by an anonymous undertaker.

Monkey Business

It has been reported that in the Tennessee legislature scores of pro-Trump lawmakers have been spotted entering the statehouse chambers dressed as humans but slowly morphing into stages of ape-like appearance. Some have shed their clothing altogether and are loping along on all fours, humping one another, and doing “Cheetah” imitations. Others have been seen grooming each other, defecating in the aisles, and leaping across desks and chairs with impunity. Meanwhile, Tennessee humans in towns all over the state, devolving to apes, are crashing cars, eating bananas, thumping their chests, and retreating to state parks and living in tribes.

Tennessee is going ape. Republican legislators who have not yet made the transition (which bathroom do transspecies use?) are changing the laws, most recently passing a bill which prohibits minors from getting Covid-19 shots unless they have their parents’, who are high on Jim Jones Kool-Aid, permission. The parents are also pushing laws to dress their teenage daughters in “Handmaid’s Tale” sheik. Not surprisingly, teenagers are rebelling—with a cause. Seems that teens think their monkey parents are batshit crazy.

Even conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has commented, “Parental rights are sacred, and, most of the time, I would say rightly so. But not necessarily when a life-saving vaccine is being withheld by parents who’ve surrendered to political rhetoric over verifiable information.”

In 1966, when I was an impressionable lad, innocent (outwardly, at least; inwardly, I was a cauldron of lust) and wholesome. I had been bitten by the show biz bug and—thank the gods—show biz would be my moral downfall. I would star in a series of plays and musicals at Monticello College, a women’s institution at which my cauldron of lust would find a home. God bless the Monti girls.

Meanwhile, I auditioned for Alton Little Theatre’s production of “Inherit the Wind,” a fictional retelling of the 1925 so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in—wait for it—Tennessee. Mr. Scopes, a substitute teacher, was asked to serve as a test case for Tennessee teachers who used a state-approved textbook on the theory of evolution. Scopes agreed, and Clarence Darrow, the celebrated Chicago lawyer and greatest orator of his time, took on fantastic blowhard William Jennings Bryan, representing Tennessee Evangelicals.

The trial became a three-ring circus, famous all over the world, with the Evangelical judge not allowing Darrow’s science experts to testify. Scopes lost—of course—was fined a few hundred dollars, and science teachers went on teaching evolution. Bryan died a few days later. Perhaps he just popped like a balloon.

At Little Theatre, I got the part of Bertram Cates, the Scopes character, a science teacher on trial for teaching evolution. Cates was represented by the Clarence Darrow character, played by my high school drama teacher, Cliff Davenport. And who did Davenport cast as my girlfriend? My sister. I told him no way, and he said OK, we’ll cast someone else for you part. Remember acting, Gene? She’s your girlfriend but not your girlfriend? And that’s how my sister and I ended up holding hands onstage, and my cauldron of lust was empty. (I was sick with flu for the run of the show; the stage manager had a vomit bucket ready for me. Coincidence?)

Remember “remember the Alamo?” The Alamo was fake news, fake as in Davy Crockett et al, decidedly not heroes, growing hair on their chests and already setting the stage for devolution, were posturing and then they got their asses kicked. Remember the polio vaccine? Not fake news. And now the Corona-19 vaccine. Ninety-five percent of the deaths from the virus are unvaccinated people. Thirty-eight percent of Tennesseans are vaccinated. And teens are getting sick.

Meanwhile, at the statehouse, humans devolved back to apes are controlling the legislature in the name of Donald Trump, that bloviating ape, who tried to forcefully mate with every cute female that crossed his path.

So, if you are “seeing monkeys,” don’t call your shrink. You are in fact seeing monkeys. Monkey pox is coming. You will know the devolving hybrid humans/monkeys by their highway signs: “Trump 2424.” They lack imagination, so they have coopted the Confederate flag.

With apologies to Willie Nelson, “Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be Trump boys.”

Cousin Rat

Sometimes I walk old man fast, five miles an hour. Sometimes I walk in a meditative state, oblivious to humidity, biting insects, the pace dictated by the see. This was one of those walks. Clouds, shadows, sun, shadows, breeze, still. I walked on air. The music of the creek and its waterfall accompanied my musing.

I thought about James Killion Jr., for whom the Alton park is named. I have had the honor this week to edit Mr. Killion’s WWII letters to his mother, his tales of guarding German and Russian prisoners near the beaches at Normandy, his anxiety about his family and his newborn son James III, his experiencing racism from white American soldiers, his friendship with the prisoners, who treated him with respect, the fragile sheets of paper, the fading penciled words. I have been walking with Mr. Killion for a week.

Twice on the walk, I saw a woman with red hair speed walking. Only the second time, her return, the red hair was dyed, she was hunched and limping and old, out of breath and facing the long hill to home.

A pileated woodpecker proclaimed its dominance, and female dragonflies flitted their wings in the grass. The green of the forest so intense from inches of water, the premature crashing of acorns as they bounced on the trail like ping pong balls. The tock-tock of chipmunks.

Descending the long buff hill, I saw a black stick—so it seemed—perpendicular to the path, but it was too straight, too perfectly rounded, and then I stopped and watched the stick slowly move east, into the grass. I ran down to where it had disappeared, and there under leaves was a juvenile rat snake, obsidian black. It let me approach and kneel at its tail, and then it coiled in case I was a predator, its white markings under its jaw, my face just inches from the gorgeous reptile.

Cousin rat, I said, though snakes do not have ears, Thank you letting me keep company with you. And I stood and backed away, and Cousin Rat became one with the undergrowth, woven into weeds and sticks and nuts and stones, the tapestry leading to the riffled water.

I said Mr. Killion’s name, for I felt he was with me, the path filled with ghosts of First People from 16,000 years ago, escaping slaves, dancing children, a woman mourning, a bent old man walking slow as an opening flower, lovers in the dark.

Sweat streamed from my face and chest and legs, but still I walked on, emerging from the woods at the river. Great egrets and snowy egrets lined the north shore of Scotch Jimmy Island, and a clutch of pelicans fished together off the sandbar. Clouds, shadows, sun, shadows, breeze, still.

Up a steep bluff hill, I paused midway and gazed at long stalks of hollyhocks and beyond were Rose of Sharon trees, and to me came a cat flopping and offering its belly, its color like marbled rye toast.

Chaos reigns. Death awaits. Time reminds us, the only specie on earth that thinks about time, the ghosts shaking their heads at our folly, Cousin Rat oblivious and entirely engaged in the present. The green cathedral and the snaking paths of the river my solace.

The Mickey Mouse Club

I won’t tell you the dentist or name the people. I will tell you, my antennae out and trolling, what I saw and heard. I was waiting to have a tooth extraction, the result of a root canal and cap gone wrong. Cap had to be replaced, but tooth had broken off at the gum line. The dentist agreed to eat the cost of extraction, cadaver bone fill, new cap, etc. First step: extraction of tooth broken below the gum line.

I sit in the lobby and wait—dentist is running late. The office manager is breaking in a new employee, explaining bonuses. I hear the words “do’s and don’ts.” I can see them through an opening in the wall, behind which are dental rooms. Suddenly the talk turns to tattoos.

Manager (M.): Oh, my tattoo artist is ____________.  We’ve been together for a couple years. We’re working on a full body design. Right now, he’s doing my entire right leg. (She shows the leg to the trainee; I can’t see it.)

Trainee (T.) Wow, that must hurt.

1. You know, yeah, a little. Wanna see my little guys? (One at a times, she pulls down the shoulders of her blouse, revealing sayings, “I love my Dad” one of them.)
2. That is so cool. (Pulls down her blouse shoulders revealing Mickey and Minnie Mouse.)
3. Oh! I have got to get that! I feel that my tattoos reveal the inner me.
4. I know, right? My kids say I’m weird.

A nurse emerges from the back.

Nurse (N.): Ewing?

She escorts me to an exam room, the dentist enters. He holds a needle.

Dentist (D.) Got to get you numb. (He injects me, my right eye starts burning, I am temporarily blind, my throat constricts.)

Gene: I’m blind—bwin-bin-b-b-b-.

1. The shot cuts off all feeling in the right side of your face.

Gene. My eye is on fire.

1. Yep.

Gene. Maybe you should have warned me.

1. And get you all upset? You’re fine. Relax, and I’ll give you a few minutes. (He exits.)

Gene: I’m seeing double. That woman in the hall, I see two of her.

1. I know, it’s a rough shot.

(N. exits, leaving me alone to wonder who I am, is there a god. D. and N. reenter, D. holding what looks to be a giant pliers.)

1. You’re going to feel a little pressure. The tooth is broken into pieces, I gotta pluck them put. (He reaches in my mouth, pulls so hard my head comes away from the headrest.) One down, three to go. (Sees that N.’s uniform top is splattered with blood. My blood. Sorry about that.
2. No worries.

And so it goes, three more times, D. chatting me up.

1. The wife and kids and I are going to Michigan. “Pure Michigan,” I love that slogan. You know why I love Michigan? It’s the 80s all over again.
2. Take me with.

What about the Proud Boys plotting to assassinate the Michigan governor, I think. D. exits.

1. Okay, no eating solid food for two days. What? No rinsing until tomorrow. What? Sign these two forms. (I sign. One of the forms reads, “Could cause cardiac arrest or death.” What?

Gene. I can’t drive like this.

1. Take your time. (N. exits. I am alone, Karl Malone, on the phone, is that a drone I moan, Jubilation T. Cornpone, sew-sewn, gro……………………….an. N. enters.) How’s the eyesight?

Gene. Double vision is gone.

1. Okey dokey, we’ll see you in two months. What?

(N. escorts me to exit, the M. and the T. look over at me, notice my tattoos.)

1. See you in two months. You should get a Mickey Mouse.
2. Definitely.

Fin

The Book of Cat

I wrote a two-part article on genealogy for the Telegraph a couple of years ago tracing my Jones family roots to Wales in the 1600s and the Baldwins to Scotland. Of course, the only specie on Earth concerned with such matters is humans. Until now.

Dr. Shirlee Godsend Pink-Tuchus, of Tufts University has traced the genealogy of cats, following the domestic cat line all the way back to biblical times. I recently submitted a cheek swab of Scout the cat, losing a finger in the process, and sent it to the Tufts laboratory.

A few days ago, a chart arrived in the mail, tracing Scout’s ancestors to a dark alley in Egypt circa AD 1142. Because cats do not name themselves and all they do do is eat, drink, sleep and fornicate, all we can surmise is that Scout’s great-great-great-great grandfather was Egyptian, and her great-great-great-great grandmother was a mix of Asian, Greek, and Belarussian, and that the two met and “did the nasty (Asian),” “plumbed the nether regions” (Greek) or as the Egyptians call it, “got it on.” And presumably walked away and smoked cigarettes.

As a kitten, Scout was found in a vacant lot in the Chicago suburbs, and she showed signs of abuse, which may explain her reluctance to be around people. I adopted her from a shelter, and the rest is history. Sort of. No cat has ever written a history.

I contacted Dr. Pink-Tuchus, and to my surprise, discovered that she is writing a sort of cat bible, “The Book of Cat.” For the ease of the reader, she names the felines so we can follow along. In the beginning, male cat (Binky-poo) mates with female cat (Calamity Jane), and it progresses from there. They were furry-naked, so no original sin there. Binky-poo and Calamity Jane had two sons, Triptych and Sockeye, and Sockeye murdered Triptych over a rat carcass, and so it went.

There is a documented Great Flood, but a cats-only ark. Just as with the human bible, the question is where did all the other females come from? We read about the cat Moises, who was discovered fornicating on a riverboat, and Salmonetta and her cat dance of ecstasy driving alley cats wild with desire.

Dr. Pink-Tuchus’ book is rather short, as it only contains a few hundred sentences which repeat and repeat, owing to the eat-drink-sleep-fornicate conundrum. Sample: “And Shorty fornicated with Jazzy, and they begat Conchita and Pretty Boy, and Pretty Boy hooked up with Delilah, and they begat Chauncy, Hickey and Rotorooter, and Conchita fornicated with Fancy Dancy and they begat La’Chaparral and Flypaper and three malformed dead kittens which they ate, and so on and so on and so on and so on, all the way to Scout the cat.

Scout is uh, fixed—no fornication. But she has the eat-drink-sleep thing down to perfection, a model of evolution, the theory of which was discovered 100 years before Charles Darwin by the historic Bookworm Attic Pussy Cat, in AD 1645.

I highly recommend Dr. Pink-Tuchus’ book. Her next book, “Antsy,” (according to publishing rumor this project will contain double the fornication!) the genome and genealogy of Formicidae Hymenoptera, a moving saga of an ant diarist (scrawled in her own poop) searching for her uncle, will be published this fall.

“Pink-Tuchus is a pioneer of animal genealogy research. I didn’t have to put it down; I read it in 15 minutes.” Malcom Gladwell, The New Yorker. “Groundbreaking, postprandial, peacockish, punctilious, palindromic, and chock full of sex!” Marjorie Taylor Greenowitz, “New York Review of Books.” “I read the dirty parts,” 10-year-old Bobby Sandusky, Alton, Illinois.