-Eugene Baldwin's – The Genehouse Chronicles

December 17, 2014

“I was helpin’ a friend of mine,” Farmer Orville said yesterday as he drove his pickup toward town, taking me to the pharmacy, “he’s been laid up for some time, had his arm removed and all. He calls me up: ‘Orville? It’s Frank. I wouldn’t bother you none but the toilet backed up and I cain’t fix it—bum arm, you know.’”

Orville wheezed out a laugh, veering the truck off the road than back again.

“So I went over there. And he wasn’t kidding. Man oh man, stuff was everywhere. I have smelled worse. Guys’d void their bowels in Korean foxholes, lest they lose their heads standin’ up. Did I mention my friend also recently had a colostomy? Don’t worry, I washed my hands before I got you.” Continue reading →

December 15, 2014

Her pitted and rusted pickup truck looked like it had been in some Middle Eastern War. The driver’s side door, dying of thirst for lubricant, screeched when she opened it. She kicked at the door with her cowgirl boots and jumped down—she might have five feet, might have weighed seventy pounds—and reached across the seat for two quart-sized Styrofoam cups and walked to the convenience store, me holding the entrance door for her. “Thank you kindly, sir.”

We hold doors here. The roughest river rat of the county will open a door for me, even as he threat assesses me. (My grandpa Red was a short man but a fierce man. His motto: Aim for the knees.)

Her ubiquitous camouflage shirt and pants hung from her. You could have fit two other women in those clothes and the three of them would not touch. Her dishwater blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her skin was sallow and grey and corpse-like. Her spindly fingers looked like wet cigarettes. She reeked of nicotine.

As I poured fifty-one cent coffee, she refilled her cups with Mountain Dew and ice. “I seen y’all before. While back. You was standin’ in line at the register, and was jokin’ about you bein’ a old man.  Hell, I thought you might be fifty, mister, sure not no sixty-six—you blew my mind. Guess how old I am.”

The old loaded game, guessing ages. “Fifty-five,” I said, thinking she looked older than me.

“Oh! You ain’t close, hon. I am forty-three.”

This is what meth addicts look like.

She walked to the counter, set down her brimming cups and pulled out her food stamp card. The clerk told her the store couldn’t accept them anymore. She pulled a wad of bills from a pocket and paid, all the while telling the clerk that the next three days would be hell on wheels for her: COPD tests, a discussion about a lung transplant.

“They say I am a bad candidate. What they really mean is, I ain’t colored. BarnesHospital, they save all the expensive stuff for blacks. I was a “smoke,” I’d have me new lungs this very day. What, I ain’t got a right to a life? You just do not know what cards life will deal you. I am cursed with bad lungs and the Type 2. But man, I just keep on rollin’.”

It was sunrise, Mountain Dew time.

December 11, 2014

Dear Mr. Ewing Baldwin,

Greetings and congratulations! The Obamacare Death Panel (section 3, paragraph two) has noticed your posts from your sickbed on Facebook, including the sentence, “Please kill me.”

We’re pleased to inform you we have found the agency for the job, and you are already in their sights. Nice woods, by the way. As a friendly precaution—we know of Cold Feet Syndrome—we’re taken the liberty of removing your car. You have our word we will not kill you unless you come outside. Sorry about that morning newspaper! Continue reading →

December 3, 2014

The old man had his viewing last night.

He lay in a plain wood casket in the west room of Gent’s Funeral Home. His was the first non-suited body I could recall, his familiar green ball cap on his bald head and a bright red sweatshirt which read: “World’s Greatest Grandpa.”

At the foot of the coffin was a wreath fashioned of bright green fir tree branches, cut from a tree in my yard. The old man loved trees. I recall him walking outside to view the damage after a three inch rain, when two mature trees, that he had planted many years ago, had been uprooted and a third, a walnut, drowned. He had been furious.

The son and daughter stood on opposite sides of the room, with fixed smiles on their faces. They can’t stand each other. A son-in-law of the daughter greeted me. He gave me a hug, which shocked me. He and his wife are the decent people of the family.

My nephew, when he was five-years-old, had danced in this very room, at the viewing of his maternal grandfather. Over and over, he and his brothers ran up to the body, yelling, “Hi, Grampy!” The little boy jumped into my arms and whispered, “Uncle Blue, Grampy is in his coughing.” Continue reading →

November 30, 2014

The old man died last night.

His night nurse awoke because she heard him calling. He was sitting in his wing chair in the finished basement, watching TV, as he did around the clock. He asked for a drink of water. She went into the kitchen and filled his glass and returned to him and he was dead, eyes fixed on the television screen.

A fire truck and crew responded to the 911 call; the truck was barely able to navigate the long, narrow, winding driveway. The paramedics knew he was dead, but they went through the motions of resuscitation. The family arrived in pickup trucks and went into the house. All this happened right under my bedroom window, and somehow I slept through it.

I had seen the old man at midnight, when—we didn’t know it, but who ever knows it?—the sands of his hourglass were rapidly draining. He always kept the curtains open and the blinking glow of the television lit his slumped body.

His wife died the second week after I moved into the rental house, eighteen months ago. She had been the rancid glue of the family. In the 70’s she ran a beauty parlor out of their home. Local women would drive up to the house, never knowing what to expect, for the family was chaotic—crazy, the neighbors said. Continue reading →

November 23, 2014

I have written about the late 70’s, when I was suffering from scars on my vocal chords, from screeching my trained tenor voice out, in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” I lost my drive to be an actor/singer, and I started writing my first play, which would end up on Off Broadway in New York, in 1983.

I got a job as a driver, school bus and celebrity van, as in Rock Hudson, Angela Lansbury, Mickey Rooney and my beloved Ann Miller and many more (the asshole Yul Brenner had an armed bodyguard who instructed me never to look at the King), those stars requiring rides from Chicago’s Arie Crown Theatre, south of the Loop, to north side actor housing in hotels. My boss gave me the latter job because “You are in show business, Eugene.”

Thanksgiving week in 1979, Gilda Radner and her then husband, G.E. Smith, who would become the band director for “Saturday Night Live,” and Don Novello, “Father Guido Sarducci,” came to Chicago to appear at the Arie Crown for the “Gilda Radner—Live From New York” Broadway show. Yours truly was their chauffeur.

Pause, to reflect on driver tipping. Ann Miller, while she and I got along famously (we even dined together at the Pump Room, in Sinatra’s booth!), even singing some of the storied songs from her extraordinary film career (“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town; the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”), would slip me a dollar bill every night I was with her. She would open a purse, Continue reading →

November 20, 2014

On the Genehouse walk, the air is sharp. The sun is cloud-cloaked, light escaping its flimsy white negligee, and kinglets glow grey-orange and bluejays are ornamental. The afternoon is soft and the breeze is coldsoft, and acorn caps rise sideways and roll on edges along the path.

Warmer days are coming, perhaps awakening hibernators from new sleep. A wave of fat robins runs down the Stroke Hill slopes and into the meadow where I see fairy rings in summer. It is a bad day to be a sunning worm.

The coal smoke from the power plant forms marshmallow shapes and blows parallel to the horizon, reflecting in the glassy river. I can see a line of parked barges downstream, waiting for their turn in the lock and dam. I turn left into La Vista Park and the air is colder, shadowy, the creek frozen, its smooth surface looking like window glass.

Thirty feet up the path, a squirrel with a nut in its jaws wheels and stares and sits up— and this is its last breath, I am the last living thing it sees in this last millisecond, for a great horned owl swoops down the left slope of the bluff and explodes the creature and lifts off, the squirrel’s body dangling limply, and small birds gang up and beak the owl’s head to no avail, and there is no sound, for the owl’s wings are serrated, and then the tiny birds shriek and three crows fly in from the right and caw a racket. This afternoon, I have seen the opaline eyes of Death. Continue reading →

November 18, 2014

He is eighty-seven, a lanky old man with a pot belly, a cane, a ubiquitous ball cap and two-pocket flannel shirt (even in summer). His skin is reptilian, from a life spent in the sun. His voice is low and sharp and practiced, as he orates twice a day, breakfast and lunch, at the local café (my grandfather called “café” “kafe,” rhymes with “safe”). He’s had more heart attacks than he can recall but he isn’t afraid. The daily bacon on his plate is proof of that. He likes coconut pancakes.

We both like ham and beans Thursday, and whoever gets there first reports: “Beans ain’t up to snuff today. Randy musta made them” Or: “Best beans ever.” Or: “Too much pepper.” Or: “Thanks for the warning; I’ll order me the cheeseburger.” Continue reading →

November 16, 2014

Farmer Orville and the Quilt Queen and I sat in their huge kitchen, eating strawberry shortcake (the biscuit-like cake was homemade) and drinking Earl Grey tea and watching the snow fall. I had just walked six miles and was sweating profusely. Orville allowed as how he walked out to the barn and back and was tired.

Mostly we swore and threatened and gnashed our teeth, as our rural landscape was about to change. A farmer sold his soybean field east of the Melville Diary and a bulldozer was parked on the land and ready to dig the foundation on Monday for a Dollar General Store. The café patrons were twenty-five against, one for, this morning.

God knows nature abhors empty land. And a Dollar General, why that will bring good paying jobs, said the one pro-store patron in the café. Alton has at least three dollar stores, one only three miles away at the corner of State and Delmar. But hey—Capitalism. Continue reading →

November 7, 2014

I was sitting in the Mehlville Dairy on Route 3 this afternoon, eating peanut M&M’s and Skittles with Greg and Rachel, when in walked Worm Wrangler, a good looking, shave-headed, forty-something black man. He loaded up a refrigerator with red wigglers and night crawlers then stopped to chat.

And since my readers have inquiring minds, I’ll happily inculcate you with some worm facts. Night crawlers can live thirteen or more years, reds slightly less. Worms do not smell; they are among the cleanest of living organisms. They have brains; the nerds wear glasses just like us. They like to screw—like us. Twenty worms in Worm Wrangler’s worm pit will become thirty thousand worms in less than a year.

Worm Wrangler feeds his charges organic vegetable waste only. In other words, they eat better than we do and have super low cholesterol. Which is a good thing, Continue reading →