Minnie’s

Minnie’s was an antique/junk store located near an artificial impoundment near the state line, where people went to buy beer, cigarettes or ice.

The place had an odor of cigarettes from the customers, naturally, but there was a deeper one that permeated every sofa , eight track tape, directional brass finished lamp and novelty blackface collectible  so they almost could have been scraped and used as evidence. It was a library of cancers, with the source materials stacked against the walls and spilling out into the room in the guise of reeking Laz-e-boys, tar crusted wagon wheel lamps and Elvis memorobilia, Mitch Miller, Bobby Goldsboro and Charlie Pride albums, walkers, elevated toilets, fiberglass composite ashtrays, and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books; all heaped in a testament to the long necrotic decline and death of every smoker and chewer in a hundred mile radius.

And you could hear her dead husband’s corpse there, too, chewing through the stick-built trailer whose tiny bathroom he elected to decorate with his brains. It was the only bathroom on the place , so you got to aquaint yourself with his ghost if you had to piss.

Over the years, I got the feeling her family was haunted. They loved God so much he decided they were improbable. Bad press. He began snuffing them steadily around her while she pretended to ignore his obvious malice. The worst was her grandaughter, who’d suffered  from seizures from early childhood, and recovered suffiently from  ice-cream scoop brain surgery to get a degree from a small college. She married some clown who spent his evenings at the titty bars and got busted downloading porn at his DOT job.

She moved back in with her folks after the divorce, and started a remote master’s program, because she couldn’t drive. I’ve never seen a twenty two year old kid that looked anything like her. She was graying and inclined to silence. When she talked, it was obvious she’d never anticipated anything  beyond childhood, and had accepted dying that way. But her father was next. He was a small round man who was anxious to be alive, as though his father’s suicide had left him with some debt of physical exertion to repay. And he just payed like he wasn’t made of skin or muscle or fat or bone – just cigarettes and how can I help you. And he helped us numerous times, to the point where I couldn’t sleep soundly for guilt. When his mother said he’d been admitted to  a teaching hospital for surgery I got that sick feeling I was about to be released from my debt. The physicians knew precisely what they were looking at, but they gamed him a little while. The initial diagnosis was a kind of  commedia del arte brutality: an ulcer on the buttocks. They scheduled a quick surgery to remove this, perhaps to determine his ability to pay. Then they delivered the punch. Wildly growing cancer of the stomach. He continued to smoke.

I met and talked with dozens of people at Minnie’s store that I wouldn’t have made eye contact with if it were strictly a matter of choice. It was odd. The pickings at the store were good enough to occasionally warrant the chance meeting with a Klansman, a Pentecostal Holiness Minister, or a lonely old man who might be stuffing dead teenagers in his basement. From Minnie’s, I purchased several heavy but functional Victorian pieces that must have been spirited from a funeral home during an insurance fire, an 1830’s reprint of a foundational Mennonite text, a hand-caned oak wheelchair, and a depression era reproduction of an Elizabethan cannonball leg dining room suite, with servier, banquette, twelve foot table and a dozen or more chairs. I found a sunlamp from the dawn of electronic quackery, paintings of Boy Scouts kneeling in supplication to George Washington, the hand carved household articles of slaves, deeply foxed popular chromolithographs of the late 19th century, and the discarded photographic record of virtually every family in the area. Minnie, it seemed, knew everybody, and worked every sale. And she brokered the meetings and conversations, too. She employed an ancient black man, William Thorpe, who’d been at Normandy when he was kicking forty years old. He was constantly trying to get us to split a dog of Richard’s with him, because he had the drinker’s eye for fellow sots. I will eternally regret not taking him up on it. Snobbery has a steep price. Much worse than a filthy hangover. When William died, my wife and I both detected a kind of slowing down in Minnie that indicated filial grief. He’d basically been her husband after the first one stuck a pistol to his jaw and gave his hell up to everybody.

William was the guy who gave the operation that fucked-up Southern panache. He did the  heavy lifting, with his wiry ass old back, and said yes-sir and yes-ma’am with an actor’s detachment. He lived in  a child’s playhouse, purchased prefab from a lumberyard. I didn’t know he was at Normandy until he died, and  I read his obit.

another summer project

At this point , I was thinking about setting it alight.

This building, adjacent to the family cemetery, was probably the shop. I don’t know when it was built, but it appears at least to have incorporated the sill plates from an older structure. At one point I considered razing it because of the extensive termite damage and subsequent collapse and settling of some of the framing members, but it had a roof, and three of its four walls were fairly sound. I brought the floor as close to level as possible,  replaced a rotten sill plate, sistered in new sleepers and 2×4 studs, and refloored and sheeted the interior with air-dried yellow pine inch boards.

The Pinheads

We needed a pair of browsers to forage in a field some distance away from the house, so we got a pair of young goats. I didn’t realize how small they are when we agreed to buy them, and I’m a little concerned the coyotes will eat them if we put them out too early. They’re currently wandering around the yard, looking for activities. There are lawn chairs to fold, piles of lumber to topple, and once they figure out a way to snake in, an entire orchard to eat.

Lopez (tentatively)

Leapez (also tentative)

High Fidelity

My wife and I struggled with all the holidays before we made a clean break for the country. We either had to make a twelve hour psychotic run to my wife’s parents house in central Florida or a 45 minute drive to my folk’s house in Durham. In both cases we would be browbeaten a little for being weird semi-hippie vegetarians, but mostly for betraying an obvious sense of relief at having escaped. My mother avenged herself by  impressing upon my wife the importance of proper gift wrapping, despite the fact my wife was investing money as well as thought in her potato- printed grocery bag wrapped gifts. Mom would unwrap the gifts we’d brought and rewrap them with the candy cane  motif stuff she’d picked up at Wal-Mart and it made her feel better so my wife sucked it up in the interest of making everyone happy.  I could have told my wife she was in the same situation as Friedrich Paulus at Stalingrad. She had arrived at the game with no options and no happy outcome was possible. My wife  at least, had the moral advantage of not being totally fucking crazy, in contrast to,  say, Field Marshall Von Paulus.

But there was an advantage to spending Christmas or Thanksgiving or New Years with my folks. After 4:00 P.M., when they’d  become exhausted with each other’s teetotalling humor and plainclothes cop sincerity, we jumped at the chance to leave with the first exodus of trophy cars. It was only then we were free to go drink with …the Republicans.

My longtime school friends’  folks were consummate 60’s era drinkers. There was always a steak giving up the last whisper of moisture on the grill, half-smoked cigarettes piled in the ashtray, and six different kinds of bourbon scattered through the house in half-finished tumblers. Frederick Remington prints adorned the washer-dryer room, where people mostly threw up. When my wife and I arrived at this party, it was a huge relief to the hosts, who’d been arguing over the proper way to show respect to Reagan. We were thirsty, and thoroughly welcome. There were finally some quasi-communists to bait. My wife, with her Bible memorization skills and Winnebago camping background, was able to hold her own with the craziest of them while I relocated the liquor cabinet.  I’d been a party to violating this thing numerous times, but never as an adult. I felt certain they’d already finished the bottles half-filled with water, but with a sense of caution, I deliberately chose the second-tier brands. God knows what the staff were doing with the juicebox.

Generally, it was a fun place to be, when the daughter wasn’t in estrus, and the son had forgone drinking until noon. We enjoyed a kind of pride of place, as friends of son, and I’m afraid we exploited it. I liked at that time  to think the gifts of liquor and cartons of cigarettes we brought offset what was about to happen, and I still like to think it, so shut up.

Eventually the sliders and half-assed partygoers would leave, usually a good hour or two before the real party started. Once it was down to me, my wife, and the family, all the strange shit would start bubbling up.

People  tend to let their guard down around me and my wife,  which is why we haven’t gone broke at bars. Bartenders just give us the run of the place and feed us free liquor because we  “open things up”. Sounds great, but it’s precisely why we can’t go anywhere anymore.  Insecure bartenders will even start adding bourbon to our coffee to induce us to hang around  and talk shit while they close up. Irish coffee is not a “driving home ” drink.

We witnessed a couple of family meltdowns, and it seemed to be OK. We were family, or all of us had ingested sufficient amounts of alcohol to be considered family, or at least, fellow Episcopalians. The worst night involved a four tier argument that was spawned, I believe, by the father’s recent diagnosis of diabetes, the appearance of a popular interest in Gay rights, the daughter’s inability to find a match without an extensive criminal record, and the son’s apparent inability to put his ass in a chair.

It started off friendly. This was during the Clinton administration and we were all blessedly naive. The conversation first centered, naturally, on my inability to hold down a real job. I was working for those Stalinist freaks at the USPS, and  thereby extending the shadow of the Roosevelt era over honest working folks. Then the conversation shifted to the daughter’s choice of boyfriends. About this time dad wandered in and poured himself a pale double Maker’s Mark and mumbled something about gays wanting special rights. This was immediately overshadowed by son falling into an ancient windsor chair and reducing it to firewood.

“If you can’t handle it, don’t drink it.”  Said dad, who then staggered out to the den to watch television.

There was a tense moment while mom wept silently for the chair. Then out of nowhere, a bitter argument over my friend’s tendency to squander his money on pornography erupted. This went on for awhile until son lit a cigarette, leaned back in a sturdier chair we’d selected for him, and said to his mother “I’ve seen you in dire, dire need.”

At this point my wife began suggesting places that could repair the windsor chair, while we simultaneously prepared to leave.

Mule and Melon

A little rain

Fred says it’s damp out. He wants in.

Trains and boats, etc.

They don’t have the Dionne Warwick version of this up anymore. Steve Simels is right. One of the best pure music songs to crawl its way out of the sixties, and now there seems to be a conspiracy to relegate it to its minor performers. I love Cilla Black sometimes (Anyone who had a heart) but she’s a parallel creep with Dionne, isn’t she?

Another look at Cilla, and it’s a little mixed. But in this case I think she got screwed by her arrangers:

Especially at the end. It’s tone deaf.

Busy

Sorry there’s been nothing new for awhile. I’ve been working on a couple of buildings, and one of them is a galvanized metal coated inferno of neural cellular death. I’m only speaking in terse sentences these days. Pictures soon.