REDNECK REBEL OF AMERICA

vada

 

 

Happy to be alive in this body has been the case for some time now. It's new. I've always been worn out by the physical. For me, living in a body is like being a mechanic. Dirty hands all the time, pushing or pulling a wrench on a rusted bolt and it breaks, my knuckles hit a piece of steel that doesn't give, I cuss a streak. If I were to be a mechanic I'd be cussing all the time. I don't care to live my life cussing so much. Though it makes a good release, like a valve on a pressure cooker. I don't ever want to write off it's healing release. Cussing is only socially indelicate. I'm not at the coffee shop so I can cuss all I want. Among my friends I'm not required to suppress how I feel verbally. Those words express intensity of feeling. Among an awful lot of people I know, my favorite people, we talk freely and use those beautiful words for emphasis, for humor, for defining a feeling, and in my case I use a lot of those words to give a flourish of emphasis to a phrase or sentence. My grandfather I knew since a baby only used those words. Every phrase in every sentence had at least one of them. When he spoke it was music to this child's ears. Especially since the grownups didn't approve of it. Grandma and my mother were used to it, though still freaked out by it. Grandpa was my dearest friend in my life at that time, three and four. All of what political correctness calls "language" was Jim Brink's dialect of the English language.

 

I know a man now, just a few years older than me, who talks exactly like grandpa. A lot of people think he's vulgar and crude. He may be, but that's not a concern of mine. He is who he is and a man I respect for who he is and what he's been through. I don't respect him because he can kick my ass. That has nothing to do with respect. I could splatter his guts all over the wall behind him too, but I'm not going to do it. And he's not going to kick my ass. I don't even have any judgment for him. I know outlines of what he's been through and done, but it's not my business to call it good or bad according to the context of his circumstances. He treats me with respect, I treat him with respect. We're very different people, most different politically, which to me is of no consequence whatever. What he does behind closed doors I don't care. I don't want to know. This is something I've come into that I'm grateful for, is not wanting to know anything about anybody that the individual him/herself does not want to tell me themselves. Too many times I've heard bullshit stories about particular people and when I eventually become acquainted with that individual I really liked them and eventually found the initial stories I'd heard were created by imagination. If I really gave it thought, I could call up several examples, a great many.

The people with bad names I don't find particularly bad, except when they are. Then they're pathetic messes battered and raped throughout their childhood, who grow up angry to the bone, starting fights wherever they go, passing on everything that had been done to them. Stay away from them drunk and allow them their lives, there's no problem. I confess to knowing some rough people, made rough by getting beat on by all the boys and men in the extended family who were older. And he thrashes the kids younger than him. I've known enough of the people called mean and criminal to know they're people too. I cannot hold prison in somebody's past against them. When I find out somebody I know has been in prison, my respect skyrockets. I'm ashamed of my country's penal system and there is nothing I can do to change it. A no recourse corner. So I stay out of prison and regard my acquaintances and friends who have been through prison the respect they deserve. I don't make a show of it, but regard them with the same respect I regard anyone else. Once a sentence is completed, their "debt to society" is completed. One friend who did six months told me it is unimaginable how bad it is, and not much later killed himself unable to live with the shame. Another told me you go into prison thinking you know how to fight. First thing you learn is you don't. Judges and lawyers laugh about what people have to go through in prison. And they know better than anybody outside a prison what goes on inside. This confirms what I already know, our legal system is a crap shoot and certainly has nothing to do with ethics. It's not about justice at all. The word justice has become a joke in my lifetime.

In the way I grew up on a short leash I didn't have a chance to be one of the wild guys that wrecked cars and got hit over the head with beer bottles and treated their women like shit. I was not a tough guy or a cool guy or anything, not even a nerd. Just a pathetic kid counting down the days to liberation from parents, cussing all the time inside. Since it was pointed out to me about a year ago that I seem to like rowdy people, I've been looking at it. I do. I was never able to act out my own rowdiness. It got locked down. I admired the other guys at school, and guys I worked with on summer jobs, who did all kinds of crazy shit, stealing hubcaps, siphoning gas, driving heedlessly fast. It never took with me, because I did not have an option. I'm thinking that in this time of the life I'm liking knowing people I think of as brave, courageous, men and women who really would kill somebody for hurting one of their kids. The only thing I could say to a friend who told me he or she was on his way to do the deed would be, While making your decision include that prison is part of the package. If it's worth prison, do what you gotta do. Something I discovered in my first years in the mountains was that I am incredibly inhibited. The people who are rowdy and rough are also superb human beings who have a hard time dealing with the false our American society requires we live by. The inability to give in to the false for the sake of "for your benefit" creates a rebel mad at the world and everybody in it, like John Voight's character in Runaway Train. This is where I bond with the redneck rebels of America.

 

 

 

 

*

TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

     robert motherwell


Another shooting incident in Milwaukee, this time several Sikhs at their temple. The white guy with the gun took the Sikhs in turbans for towel-head Ay-rabs. What's the difference? Immigrants. Not white. I saw a posting somebody put on facebook a few days ago of an American Indian with words to the effect that we're concerned about immigrants coming in and taking our land away from us. The man doing the shooting, an adult white male, was bagging some towel-heads for Rush Limbaugh. This morning on the Diane Rhem interview show on NPR, she had some yoyo talking about we have to stop this phenomenon of surprise shootings by going to the source. That is lone wolf white men. Single white men who have been to Vietnam, though not necessarily. Now single white men are preemptive suspects. They need to be "surveiled." I'm thinking it needs to go deeper than that for the cause. Like if we want to cure the problem, let's do away with ignorance. That's not going to happen. It's too late. It's not going to happen anyway. This looks like a time of steady increase of ignorance instead of decrease.


I keep on thinking of a cartoon seen several years ago, a lot of years ago. Two little boys. One tells the other he saw a flying saucer land and a little man came out. The other little boy said, "What'd he say?" "He said, Take me to your leader." "What did you do?" "Nothing." "Why not?" "I didn't know who my leader was." That's how I've felt all my adult life. I'm not sad about it. I'm glad none of the politicians in the country can be called my leader. Not in any way I could tolerate would I call any of them my leader. What a travesty it is that we only have politicians to call our leaders. They are not anybody's leaders. They couldn't lead a pack of dogs by pushing a meat wagon. Some people might think of some of them as their leaders, but I can't imagine who they'd be, unless they would be obedient corporate execs. I feel the same sorrow that possessed Gore Vidal in his last years, sorrow seeing what has become of the home of the brave, the land of the free, all that uplifting belief system we learned as children in school, along with the honor of dying for country.


These shootings by white guys that happen more and more frequently inspire no sociological or psychological investigations into what it is in the society that inspires this behavior. Like Charlton Heston said of American history in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, "We have a lot of blood on our hands." Karma. As a nation, we have killed freely all the way along as if it were our righteous duty as a nation "under God," whatever that means. I can't help but see these surprise "random" shootings as karmic return on a major part of the American character, the right to kill. I see this guy in Aurora, Colorado, entering the exit door of the theater and shooting people by surprise, like I see General Custer with horse hooves covered for silence in first light charging a village with snow muffling the horses' hooves for surprise. They charged in quietly and killed as many as possible, killed their horses. Reading in American history what General George Custer did to the Indians, I couldn't help but be satisfied he met his end at the Little Big Horn. As is said of karma, he had it coming, in abundance. Before he went down, he had the opportunity to see his regiment was being wiped out. How many villages had they wiped out?


On the ship in the Navy, it could be said the captain was my leader, but in my heart and mind, he was not anything to me. He was a player in a game I wanted nothing to do with. In the time of the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, "crisis," when some communists were making a play for power and the fascist government couldn't handle them, calling on the Americans for assistance. My ship was sent there to "patrol" back and forth across the harbor in front of Santo Domingo. It was a beautiful city from the sea. On watch at night I could see The King And I, the Yul Brynner version, playing on the drive-in theater screen with binoculars. It wasn't like I was distracted by it. Had it been La Dolce Vita, I'd have been distracted for sure. The thrill running through the officers was the chance that we might be able to lob some shells into the city and do some damage. Americanista power. I prayed the whole time we were there that we not fire on the city. I could not tolerate being a part of the American war machine shooting up the poor section of the city. Of course, that's where the terrorists are hiding; in that time they were called communists.


Without public health care, without public psychiatric help, the people needing help don't get it when they're of the working class and can't afford insurance. To politicians that's ok. The working class is the enemy, potential rioters, strikers, the thick-fingered masses. Plus, they don't have any money to give the politicians, who are even worse than preachers at asking for free money. If you're not a source for free money, you don't exist, even if you tell good jokes. I'm glad I don't exist to them, like I'm glad I don't exist for the Jehovah's Witnesses. The last time they stopped here, I ran them off permanently. Nothing here of interest to you, just an old set-in-his-ways heathen. The new people to go around in the cars browbeating people in their own homes are told when they pass my house to keep away from that old man, he might shoot you. I don't know that for a fact, but I do imagine what they say is an exaggerated version of whatever it is I said or did that they understood all those years ago. Whatever it is, it keeps them away. No need to question a good thing.


We have such a hard-edged martial society where big college jocks on steroids bash into each other in mosh pits to hard-core punk at concerts. There is an underlying hostility between men who go around with chips on their shoulders looking for anybody to knock one off by looking at him wrong. In Glade Creek several years ago a man had an acre of ground covered by 55gal barrels standing above the ground on posts with a gamecock attached by tether to the barrel that was his home. Chicken prison was all I could think. I felt sad for those poor chickens having to live. Something like that makes me then feel sorry for all the domestic animals around the globe that are regarded without soul, without consciousness, without feeling, without emotion, without even awareness. Then it gets so immense I can't handle that thinking any more and have to let it go as something beyond my mental capacities. I accept on a deeper level how things are. Acceptance is what I want more and more of in myself. I find the more I accept the context of my life, the easier my life can be.


*

GOD WEPT

light in the window



I've had a bit of a heavy heart since this afternoon when a memory surfaced in conversation with a friend of many years, of some people we knew who have been dead 20 years. I'd been a member of the Regular Baptist Church in Glade Valley, Laurel Glenn, 14 years, went regularly because I loved it. I loved the people in the church, all of them. They were the people I felt the very closest to. People I could count on and they could count on me. In the beginning, Millard Pruitt, the preacher, told me it was my duty to go to church regularly. I told him I don't do duty. Duty is mechanical. I go to church when I want to go. It just happened I wanted to every meeting time. To his way of thinking, I was fulfilling my duty. To my way of thinking, I was going because I wanted to. If there were any preachers Millard Pruitt's equal in the county, I wouldn't know who they'd be. Millard had the spirit something awful, in the old way of putting it when awful meant full of awe. I'm grateful every year of my life I have experienced Elder Millard Pruitt's preaching. A lot of people didn't like him, but nobody could deny his preaching.



A time came when the light went out in my heart for the church and one morning heading out the door, I put my hand on the screen door to push it open and couldn't do it. I stood there, hand on door, unable to move. I didn't want to go. I said, 'Ok. You don't have to.' Next meeting time I couldn't go either. There came a time I realized something had died inside. At the time I thought it was that Millard was unable to preach any more and this man who got some kind of crazy notion he was called to preach came in to take his place. I couldn't leave the house to go listen to him run his mouth, "trying to talk." Meaning nowhere near preaching. He was a good old boy, good natured as anybody could be, had extended himself to help people around him in whatever kind of need all his life. If he was called to preach, the preaching never happened. It got to the place I couldn't listen to him any more.



But something before that made it easy, when otherwise I might not have been able to leave the church. One day maybe less than a year ago it came to me what put the light out that was in my heart. The day Sabe Choate, the old black farmer whose land surrounded the church's lot on 3 sides, whose house was the next house up the road, dropped in on a meeting in his Alzheimer time. Sabe grew up in that church house as it was originally a black church bought by the Regular Baptists. The cemetery Sabe would be buried in was across the road. During the meeting I saw an old man hat go by the window opposite where I sat. I wondered who would be coming to the meeting this late. I don't recall anyone coming in that late to a meeting. At the door in a suit, holding his hat in his hands in front, standing at the threshold looking at the floor appeared Sabe Choate, far away in Alzheimer absence of mind. My heart wept seeing him. Millard said, 'Come on in, Sabe.'



Old man Sabe stepped in the door and sat in the same seat I sat in my first time. I sat there with Sabe on my mind the whole time, the years I'd known Sabe, 14 years, him stopping by on his tractor when I was there mowing the lawn and every 4 years painting the house, to talk a little bit and tell me the Lord's gonna bless me for what I'm doing. I came to know him well enough to know there was no better man on this earth than Sabe Choate in God's eye. Anyone who ever knew him would readily affirm it. I was holding back tears from seeing Sabe in the shape he was in, as well as immense respect for Millard, because I wasn't sure he'd ask Sabe to come in. After the preaching and the singing, we all set about shaking hands with each other singing the last song. I went straight to Sabe and shook his hand about to lose it seeing him like that. I went around shaking hands with the others and began to notice nobody went to shake Sabe's hand. Everyone walked by him like he was invisible. If I'd thought about it, I'd have been ready, but I hadn't thought about it and was not ready.



I told myself, 'You're in the South. This is their culture, their church, their beliefs, I'm not here to change any of that. I'm here to accept.' I let it go, forced myself to pay it no mind, while my soul was in tears. When we were going out the door, people standing around in small groups talking, I heard Sabe's car cranking but not starting. I went around to see if I could help him. He kept on grinding the starter until the battery started weakening. I stopped him so the battery wouldn't go dead; we might need it. We raised the hood and looked at the motor as if either one of us would know what to look for or do. We put the hood down and he went back to cranking it. Not 15 feet away the alternate preacher and a deacon were talking. Neither of them looked our way, never offered a hand, acting like we were invisible and inaudible. The car finally caught hold and sputtered into motion. Sabe backed out and putt-putted up the road to home. Inside, I was a wreck insisting to myself I not judge these two men who had nothing for their church's neighbor, people who have gone to church all their lives, the deacon the son of a preacher. I told myself over and over, this is the South, let it rest.



The day I stood at the screen door unable to push it open, I didn't consciously know the Sabe Choate incident had made it easy for me to stay at home. A light had gone out inside and I felt the church and everyone in it were far away, somehow not so much my people any more. Today, in town talking about it, I felt a great deal of sorrow. Then, arriving home, going through emails and computer stuff, Sabe came back to mind. I put my head in my hand and the tears flew. I was thinking how glad I am I shook Sabe's hand instead of following the lead of the others. God was there. God saw it. God did not judge them, but I know God wept, because my soul wept. I sat with head in hand and tears going, thinking I'd have carried intense guilt the rest of my life if I hadn't gone to Sabe to shake his hand, among the most honorable men I've ever known, and none more humble. I wondered if I'd be able to tell you the story without turning passionate and going into a rant. But I have no rant about it. It's just among the saddest moments of my life that ran way deeper than I knew. It turns out that's where I lost confidence in church. I'm unable to join another, though I like to visit from time to time for the beauty and the love of it.



*

INTERIOR FOUNTAIN

tarbaby memorial

This morning I took down the large b&w photo of Tommy Jarrell playing fiddle from above the home entertainment unit and replaced it with a painting I made of TarBaby when he was about a year old sitting on a fence post. Only about 5" of the top of the post visible, the post a pedestal for the cat, like a block of wood or stone a sculpture stands on. Somehow it happened that it's not just a painting of a black cat, it's TarBaby in particular, almost in person. Somehow the eyes just happened as TarBaby's eyes. I look at it now and it's almost like his spirit is in the painting. Like the feeling I had after painting Tom Pruitt, that his spirit was in it. It's still in it. I'll never sell either and both are accounted for upon my demise. Tom will stay in his family and TarBaby is for Meredith. I know if Meredith had known TarBaby she would love him as I have.

It still doesn't feel right. No matter how I try to accept it, it's not right. Nothing is right about it. I have to disclaim that I am in full acceptance of it as the right time, and will be happy to find that acceptance, but haven't yet. I can't help but conjecture that when I took him to the vet at 7 on a Sunday morning, when he was within a few hours of dying, that might have been his time. He came back to give me some more time. Our friendship grew in those 4 months as closely as my friendship with Jr grew in his last 4 months to such, that like Jr said, we are like brothers. Maybe TarBaby chose a quick way out when he'd finished what he stayed with me to do, to weave our souls inseparable. I open my arms and say to him, Please come live inside me, live in my heart, if that's what you want. I want it too. This evening after I walked in the house from seeing friends I sat down and spoke to TarBaby. I found myself singing to him his song I started singing to him when he was a kitten a few weeks old. Each one has their own song. I sang TarBaby's song to him a long time, calling his spirit, tears dripping off my chin, questioning my good sense, throwing that out the door like a banana peel. I was singing to my friend in my heart, where he's been all along anyway. It did my heart good. And I'll do it again and again.

Acceptance is on the slow boat. I'm like John Lee Hooker sitting by the waterfront waiting for his baby. There's fog in the harbor, waiting for the ship that's carrying his baby to him. It's a quiet, talking kind of song with his guitar making notes around his voice, waiting in the fog. The song is The Waterfront. It's done as only John Lee Hooker can do it. It's his song and nobody else's, like Crawlin King Snake and Boogie Chillun. I'm sitting waiting in the fog for the ship that's bringing my baby, my acceptance, sitting on my bench by the waterfront. In the fog.

I stopped by to see Melia and Joe Edwards and Judy Carmichael at their Gallery in Pine Swamp. Spent a good bit of time talking with them, my new friends by Jr, Melia and Judy Jr's second cousins, their daddy, his first cousin, Claude Edwards. They were super supportive in my sorrow upon losing Jr. It was their sorrow too. They've loved Jr since they were babies. Their daddy and Jr were close friends as well as cousins. Jr has always been important in their lives. Though the natures of our loss were different, all felt the void in the heart. When we're together, we bring Jr back for each other. We talk about him in our memories. And we like each other too. Throw Melia and Judy's mother in too, and they are 4 supreme human beings I am grateful to God for bringing into my life.

One of my friends suggested I make a memorial to TarBaby since I can't bury him. I liked the idea of it. But it's not me to do memorial kind of things like spontaneous ceremonies, lighting a candle and saying a prayer, for example only. It's not me. I don't believe a "ceremony" unless it comes from my own heart spontaneously. So I thought I'd wait for that, if it's to be. When the image of TarBaby took its new place, it came to life. Putting down the Jarrel photograph, I saw a foot high figurine of a black cat sitting like TarBaby in the painting. Gloss black stylized, leaning toward Deco, kind of 50s, with the three spots of eyes and nose in gold. It's a beautiful cat I found at Karen Bledsoe's shop by the river. It was so TarBaby I had to bring it home. I kept it in a box to protect it most of the time. I didn't want to stand it up anywhere, because I didn't want to chance breaking it. There was a feeling about it that after I lose TarBaby it could be my beautiful reminder to see every day. Now it is. I've found my memorial. A sculptural and a painted representation of my friend I mothered into life and never weaned. It makes me think of a mother losing her teenage daughter in a phone call telling her the girl died in a car wreck. The bottom drops out. Thats it, cat shit. Accept this.

At lunch with Jim Winfield at the Pines, we talked with a dairy farmer friend of his, who sang us some serious blues of what's become of dairy farming as a way to make a living. He's at a place where he's ready to let it all go. I talked with a friend yesterday who was telling me about his ability to walk away from a good paying job and start a little something of his own he knows will work for him from the start. When they 1984 him into a corner he might come out swinging a two-handed samurai sword. Not really. It was just an image that came to me from seeing so many Asian films with sword fighters going at it and red fluid that never looks like blood squirting even on the camera lens. Just meant it as a metaphor. He's not really going postal with a blade. Just talking about having his bases covered and the freedom he has from worry. We both like Asian sword fight movies.

Talking with Winfield at the table, I told him a little bit about the fountain of love flowing from my heart and filling my whole being with love almost beyond containment, like a cup runneth over kind of love energy going on. It's like there is a big fountain, water rushing from it in all directions. The least little thing, an old man entering the restaurant stayed outside the door as an old woman with a cane was being assisted out the door by her daughter. He helped her down the steps, stayed with her until she was steady on her feet, came in and joined his wife waiting for him. That little moment happening out the window by where we were sitting brought a welling up of tears of compassion. I said to Jim, I'm getting tender hearted in my old age. He said, I think we all do. Maybe so. I'm happy with it. It's like the fountain of compassion is a gift from God to help me in the time I sit in the fog waiting for acceptance.