Okay, I’m on the upstairs porch of Chico Feo the afternoon after a Screamin’ J’s Friday night gig listening to some jamming when Eddie Cabbage asks me if I would like a poem on demand.
I demur, but he insists.
Hank Weed suggests something that incorporates cancer and poison ivy, because Hank claims that last year he asked me how it was going, and I said, “I have a bad case of poison ivy, and, oh yeah, Judy has cancer.”
[cue the Coasters]: Going to need an ocean of calamine lotion (and fifty bags of chemo).
Before I share the poem, here’s Eddie at work yesterday.
And here’s the poem with the warning that the squeamish might find its imagery unpalatable.
I missed a bus in Baltimore, and with no place to stay, restless, desperate, running low, I thought I’d try to hitch a ride.
I should have known. Ain’t no decent man gonna pick up a hoary-headed hobo nowadays.
I stood on the shoulder, stuck out my thumb, squinting down the highway through the afternoon exhaust, hoping that some good Samaritan might stop.
Eight hours later, round about one or so, a jacked-up pick-up pulled over, one of them monster pick-ups, black, four-door, with a stunted back seat of sorts.
“Hop in, old man,” the driver snarled. “Let’s go. Ain’t got all night.”
I slung my bag into the bed, climbed my way way up, and slammed the door.
The passenger rolled up his window, the driver grabbed the wheel, put the pedal to the metal, war-hooped a holler, laid some rubber, and we was on our way.
The two of them wore their baseball caps backwards, nothing but kids, white, maybe twenty or so, but right off I could see their eyes lacked light, like they was lost.
(And I could’ve been sleeping in that depot waiting for the morrow).
“How much you plan pay us for this ride?” the driver drawled. “We ain’t no commies, ain’t got no use for no freeloaders.”
I told them I was bust broke, that if I had me some money, I wouldn’t be standing on the side of a highway at one a.m. in the morning.
The passenger punched me in the chest, slapped my face, and while I was wallowing, jacked my wallet.
The driver pulled over, hopped out, slung me to the ground, climbed back in, then drove off with my bag in the back rattling around in the bed of the truck.
That was a month ago. I’m back in Mayo now writing these so-called adventures on scraps of paper.
I keep them on my person, in the pocket where my wallet used to be, so on the day they find me dead, they’ll know a bit about me.
This week, during our summer break, the members of the mighty English Department where I teach have met voluntarily to fine tune our program.
Despite my having to abandon the funky barrier island where I reside and drive twenty minutes to the mainland, it’s really enjoyable to banter and swap stories with friends and colleagues who can pick up on obscure literary allusions.
Part of the fun is that we establish motifs, repeat at apt times absurdities that have come up, and one of the major motifs this week has been an anonymous student’s declaration after reading Walden that he or she “hates nature.” (By the way, we don’t name names – I only know whoever made this absurd statement as “a student”).
Of course, hating nature is hating the complex interconnectedness of atmosphere, water, vegetation, geology, animal life, etc. that has given rise to the consciousness of the nature-hater. It’s sort of like saying I hate ingestion or respiratory systems.
Nevertheless, we know what the student means. She/he doesn’t dig Thoreau, the great outdoors, would rather be inside in an air-conditioned space staring into some sort of screen.
And maybe, this American Lit student learned when reading Stephen Crane and Jack London that nature is absolutely indifferent to him or her.
So, there!
Anyway, yesterday, when riding my bike along Atlantic Avenue, I caught a whiff of a rotting carcass hidden from my view, and a nature-hating muse descended.
You Do Hoodoo 