"Uncle Scoop" was another one of Dad's wobbly-voiced chums from college. . . . . no women, no excitement, no "James Bond" lifestyles exploding out of "a secret Bat Cave" like a masked sex god, but a hold-over from those dim, dull days of the early '60s on The University of Missouri-Columbia campus where you would find young men in plaid shirts and Buddy Holly glasses having late-night "raps" over politics. At best, your reward was a blue Kuahula drink in a giant punch-bowl glass and at worst, baffled sexual befuddlement as the gang looked over at two girls just sitting down at a table in their overcoats, bereft of the courage to swagger over like Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones". To do so would have been to fail on such a titanic scale, so they directed their concern to more concrete, yet theoretical things perhaps a little too intensely.
Trailing on the heels of a nominated leader and seeking an audience with the dean, who politely listened to their fervent-yet-milquetoast proposals and amending the changes to the status quo like an extra inch of "space age" tail fins. "Fine citizenship", the dean would righteously conclude to himself and tap his papers on the desk in the wholesome middle American heartland of corn fields and the home-coming float of blonde beauty queens and football.
Such American splendor (-- if you could call it that) was gone now, blown away like dead wheat stalks in the wind. If there had been "a cat-house" on the other side of town, it was boarded-up and condemned. The carnivals and geek shows had faded away. The promise of modernism, "the space age", and "Johnny Atom" had not been all that it was cracked up to be-- as the consensus narrative splintered and the fat cats made appeals to something that once existed, if it ever existed, to bring in the most military-industrial contracting dollars and deregulation and tax breaks "so America could stand tall again". The party, the bacchanal, the orgy of greed had left the countryside squeezed dry as the survivors picked among the rubble and saluted the flag.
Those who had a hard enough time surviving in a more robust era, wobbling around like Kurt Vonnegut or J.D. Salinger, would not outlast a harder, angrier, bleaker environment where the only escape was the "idiot box" distraction of modern-day entertainment from the gray and stringy fiber of a rat-meat existence, the lonesome calling of the grave where all was quiet and the earth moist like chocolate cake.
The mood was something lost and teenaged
and forsaken
for your author, the changing color of the
fall leaves and the deep blue sky and retirees limping out of their R.V's to
relieve their bladders as my Dad and I took this late October trip to visit "Scoop" out
near Kansas City.
I was a fireball of wants, a sump pit of stinking crude oil someone had thrown a match into, a subterranean fire in a deep, underground mine of impurity, of scurrying rats and broken machinery. All of this intensity I felt, with the flatness and literal-mindedness of rural Missouri life going on outside beyond my eyes, in despair "for want of a nail" or a lifetime annuity or a pretty girl who would listen and understand perfectly. A pendulum of need swings back and forth, regulating our desires with a feedback mechanism that tells you where to go. Discontent is what makes the world go 'round and 'round and I was dying to live, living to die and unable to do neither effectively.
Outside my eyes the world seemed boggling and incomprehensible, some distorted cartoon canvas of nightmare logic, and I had not landed an intuitive grasp of "the rules" that governed our world. I had an image of myself "being unmasked", the storybook image of a wild, hunch-backed misfit in some German hamlet in the early 19th century-- pudgy, nearsighted, dirty, wretched, and half-insane with fury-- and the constables coming along to drag me from the thatched-roof house and hang me from an oak tree in the town square. If I had been "thrown from the horse of life" I was now walking a while with a bruised behind unsure if I would-- or could-- ever get back in the saddle as my Dad patiently walked along with me.
And here was Scoop, who ran his small-town journal in Smallville. Local coverage-- high school football, bake sales, what passed for politics, and obituaries across the withered plain that time forgot. The town whisked away and was gone in 20 seconds. A diner. A bar. Another diner. "Pizza Wurld". "Sure n' Save" grocer. A barbershop. Then we were driving miles and miles until we pulled into a neighborhood of manufactured tract homes placed atop a hill. Open garages, lawn mowers, and basketball hoops snaked up the side. It was very quiet, and who knew what kind of adventures awaited out here in this wide, waiting world?
"Welcome, welcome. Come in, come in." Hand shakes all around, as Scoop wobbled around the pleasantries. His voice was maddeningly relaxed, tempered in the latent way a small town could make you with the nonexistent pace of things. He might as well have been "Mr. Rogers" on Thorazine, Jimmy Stewart on qualudes, or Norman Rockwell on dope.
"That's quite a bachelor pad you got there", Dad ribbed. From the dining room landing, gesturing down to the living room where bookshelves leaned, a vibrating chair cover, and a sagging patch in the plaster ceiling. Evidently this was luxury compared to how Scoop used to live. And offering us premium beer?! He had grown extravagant in his late middle-age! A hot-tub in the guest room was another revelation of unheard indulgence, like all the gold hanging in Catholic Rome if not the halls of Constantinople before it was looted by saber-rattling Turks . . . . . the decline and pillage of history where you were comparatively lucky "not to be born at the wrong time in the wrong place", whatever my slender ghost of a chance here in the known Western world at the close of the millennium.
That night we had cold barbeque out of a Tupper-ware container. Another jaw-dropping shock compared to days afield. This kicked off our two days here. . . . . who was this fucker?
"So Scoop, what's there to do around Smallville around 7 PM on a Sunday night?", I wondered with creeping optimism. Yes. . . . . for who knew what adventures waited in this far, reaching world?
"Kansas City is really more of a weekend town" he explained in his dry Midwestern accent. 1,000 deaths. . . . . shrieking men chained up in dungeons, could a man die of boredom?
"Well, what's on t.v.?"
"I don't watch much t.v. I only get three channels"
"Well, what if we rented a movie?" The hope lit up like a beam of light shining straight up out of a grain field, a bright spot in what was shaping up to be the slowest weekend in my life. Time has passed faster at hospitals, at funeral homes, in church. I wanted to rent "Beetlejuice" and see Winona Ryder again. A magical girl for miserable times.
Kooky, kooky, kooky.
"I have a VCR but it's been unhooked for a while now, I can't get it going",
he reflected in his maddening, sing-song voice.
"The video store is
fifteen miles away and's probably closed"
"Well, um," taking a sip from my glass of Pepsi. "I saw an amusement park on the way out here, kind of like "Six Flags" back in St. Louis. Maybe we could go tomorrow"
"I don't like amusement parks. They make me queasy"
"He's always been this way", Dad explained as Scoop put on his woolen pajamas in another corner of the house. His frequent Midwestern pauses, drifting voice, and dry giggle was too much. How you would say something, and after two sentences his eyes would glaze over, before interrupting you to tack off in another direction like a tortoise glancing off the wall of your mounting frustration. There he was, perhaps forever young, forever naive to the effect he had on people. It was itching, it made you want to howl, it made you want to kick down the door and go running off through the night like a werewolf vaulting over fences, rolling over the hoods of pick-up trucks, and finding a girl (-- initials W.R.) who would listen to his rants before he pressed the "Hollywood" sign over his head and crushed Miramax studios with it.
No one else could stand him either. Scoop was remembered as the dorm cheapskate, tossing a few token carrots in the communal "Mulligan's stew" so he could gobble "over and beyond" his entitled portion. Using up all the hot water, taking others' towels, and leaving the floor sopping with complete oblivious disregard "to the rules", which even shined through the opaque filters of my social L.D's. Many a time, Dad had to intervene to keep his friends from trashing Scoop down the stairs like a living Howdy Doody doll, a stupid grin on its face always as it danced around in a plaid shirt with jerking, unnatural movements.
********************
The following night, for no particular reason at all, Scoop drove us down to the Smallville levy-- the town's namesake. What a tour, ten miles from anywhere as he gave a dry history of the settlers from the turn-of-the-century (-- among them the ugliest women on record) who lived, frowned, and died-- pulling up in ox-carts and swooping at the fields with scythes. There was nothing but BLACKNESS out there, whooperwills and critters and foxes engaged in more sexual congress than I thought I'd ever be, and the parking lot was washed out with the bleak, sodium-arc lights of the public works department as I wanted to weep with boredom out upon a sea of concrete. I was drinking malt liquor at a prodigious rate, one after the other to numb the "clawing feeling" inside of wanting to kick at the seat and scream.
Much, much later, he unlocked the door of the newspaper office, a single-story building on main street. Stencil graphs, computers yellowed with age, and the overwhelming stench of ink. Bulletins and posters were tacked up. Norman Rockwell's "The Country Editor" hung from one wall.
It was interesting enough for the first 45 minutes, a sort of grueling determination not to shriek at the man and flap your arms. While he rustled for something in another room, reminiscing over his shoulder excruciatingly, I tapped on Dad's arm, pointed at the door, and jerked my head in that general direction like a Vaudevillian on crack cocaine. Anything to get away from THAT MAN.
Now, after the experience is nearly a decade in the grave, it has become a running joke of where we'll spend our fall vacations. . . . . IN SMALLVILLE!!!!!!
(There is a lesson here-- we
can definitely be ambitious!)
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2010 by Insufferable Industries
Drop "The Bard" a line at