” Folly Beach

Tales of Bad Parenting

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As my regular readers know, I possess an incredibly delicate, depression-prone sensibility. I find large “family friendly” crowds especially nerve-wracking, particularly if those families come from “all walks of life.” I can handle “non-family friendly” gatherings just fine. Heavy metal rock concerts, ecstasy-fueled raves, St. Patrick Day’s pub-crawls, and violent protests don’t bother me a whit; however, a day trip to somewhere like Six Flags hurls me headlong into Sylvia-Plath-like pits of deep despair.

We’re talking Mariana Trench, Dante’s Malebolgia, i.e., super subterranean levels of depression.

Imagine my horror, then, when one Saturday twenty years ago around noon, my 8th grade son Harrison asked if I would take him and his 6th grade brother Ned to the Coastal Carolina Fair.

“It’s the very last day,” he added.

Mental montage:

 

We were driving on Ashley Avenue in the small beach community where we live.[1] I looked over at my wife Judy whose expression was one that you might encounter if you had just informed someone that she was being sequestered for jury duty for a Gambino brother trial in Newark.

These words came out of my mouth: “You boys ever hear of Playboy magazine?”

They answered in the affirmative.

“Well, what if instead of taking you to the fair, I bought you a copy of Playboy magazine instead?

“You’re kidding, “ Harrison said, the glee in his voice approaching bicycle-under-the X-mas-tree levels.

“I’m absolutely serious,” I said. “By the time we return home, get ready, battle the bumper-to-bumper traffic, find a godforsaken place to park, trudge the five miles to the entrance, we’ll all be exhausted.”

“You’re sure you’re not kidding?”

“Watch me.”

What he left unsaid, but it registered loud and clear: “You’re the greatest dad in the world!”

So we pulled into Bert’s Market, and I found the magazine rack and secured the current issue of Playboy, which featured the German figure skater Katrina Witt.[2] The transaction was made, the product sheathed in a brown paper bag.

Once we returned home, the boys scampered into the room and slammed the door.

The next day, while they were out skateboarding, I slinked into the room with the intention of checking out the issue myself, but they had hidden it, as if it were contraband.

Finally, I had to ask them outright if they minded if I took a look at it. I promised to give it back.

[1] Let me hasten to add that despite the tale that is to follow, our two sons have managed to graduate from college (one has a masters in linguistics, the other makes 30K more than his old man who has 31 years of teaching the same gig). In other words, they no longer live with us.

[2] People often ask why both boys majored in German. It just occurred to me that this event might have played a role.

 

Blow, Matthew; Crack Your Cheeks; Rage, Blow

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Winslow Homer:

Winslow Homer: “Hurricane”

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

                              Adrienne Rich, “Storm Warnings”

As I type this, my wife Judy Birdsong and I are awaiting Hurricane Matthew’s arrival on a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. Ominously enough, Folly Beach is the name of this island. Folly’s main historical claim to fame is that Union soldiers occupied the island during our Civil War[1] and Gershwin wrote the music for Porgy and Bess here while staying at DuBose Heyward’s beach house. Heyward’s novel Porgy, by the way, features a hurricane, but one that sneaked upon the characters in those simpler days before Jim Cantore became a household name.  Nothing against Jim and the well-meaning folks at the Weather Channel, but enduring the high keen of their histrionic prophecies is a bit of a drag for us seasoned veterans of what Adrienne Rich calls later in the poem quoted above “troubled regions.”  Also, no doubt, well-meaning, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina shut down the state from the capital to the coast Tuesday evening.  She actually decreed all capital city schools be closed, including the University, even though the capital, Columbia, is situated 100 miles inland, and the order came over 48 hours ago.[2]

Here’s what it looks like right now from our bedroom window (i.e. 3:05 EDT 7 Oct 2016).

Our decision to defy Governor Haley’s mandatory evacuation order worries some of our friends, and it ‘s not surprising given the Weather Channel correspondents’ brow-beating and pleading. Perhaps because I am a native here, and this will be my sixth storm, I’ve come to resent the complete and utter lack of nuance we are subjected to during tropical events.

For example, we’ve been warned that there will be “storm surges that we’ve not seen since Hurricane Hugo,” which is true, though with Matthew the surges at Charleston are estimated to be 4 – 6 feet and with Hugo the largest was measured at 21 feet.

post Matthew damage on Daytona Beach

post Matthew damage on Daytona Beach

Sullivans Island post Hugo

Sullivans Island post Hugo

Believe me, if I lived in a mobile home or a one-story house on a slab at sea level, I would be long gone. However, we don’t, are in our 60’s, and as Judy puts it, “I  have cancer anyway.” In other words, we’re having fun, an adventure.   If only Fernando and Alameda Marcos could join us and sit in these throne-like stacked chairs hauled in from the screen porch.

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We believe in science. Matthew’s pressure has risen 9 millibars in 6 hours, our house was built to exceed hurricane codes, and its bottom floor is 30+ feet above sea level.

In fact, my biggest concern is that we’re going to run out of boiled peanuts.

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[1] AKA among the unreconstructed as “the War Between the States” or, worse, “the War of Northern Aggression.” As Hamlet put it, “though I am native here/And to the manner born,” I somehow ended up a liberal and acknowledge my region’s “manifold sins and wickedness” yet still somehow love Dixie, treasure my native soil. Go figure.

[2] Governor Haley, once the darling of Sarah Pallin, perhaps, to use hurricane lingo, has jogged to the left during her two terms, though it would appear that she’s not all that big on science. My son, who teaches in Orlando, much closer to the storm’s “wrath,” had a full day of school on Wednesday and a half day yesterday.

The Whatness-of-the-Right Now

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06_10_018861Chapter 1: Losses and Gains

I’m a 47-year-old man who’s lost a portion of my left leg to diabetes, my erstwhile wife to — and I’m not making this up — a yoga teacher ten years her junior.

I would like to think, however, that through these two rather major subtractions, I have gained a greater appreciation for what I’ve come to call the Whatness-of-the-Right Now (WORN), Now I pay heed to the slow softshoe of the keyboard’s clicking, note the redness of the Bic lighter lying next to my empty coffee cup, the grain of the walnut of this desk that once was a tree, the steady samba sway of the branches of magnolia outside my study’s smudged window panes.

As that master of the Whatness-of-the-Right-Now, Van Morrison, once scatted, “It ain’t why why why why why; it just is.”

So I’ve tried to jettison the dichotomy of wise and unwise and replace it with interesting versus uninteresting, which, of course, is inviting Old Man Trouble to crash on your couch. Also, I guess I should mention I have a 17-year-old daughter Bronwyn whom I’m attempting to nudge in the right direction, i.e., a path that leads to happiness. Of course, at her point in life, WORN and opting for what’s-interesting over what’s-not-interesting is as foolish as encouraging her to read The Sound and the Fury in the dad/daughter book club we’ve formed. [1]

Dad, I’ve decided to go to the all-night rave in a club downtown instead of the Drama Club production of Annie. The rave sounds more interesting. Yes, I have my fake ID! Jeez, Dad!

The thing is, though, when WORN kicks in, everything is interesting – even the logo of the Allstate bill that lies next to the empty coffee cup.

 

images

Why blue?

Are the hands about to receive a communion wafer?

Are we the communion wafer?

Are they the Hands of God?

How come the A is listing to the right?

How much was the creator of the logo paid?

 

Hang Outs

After our divorce, Gwen and I sold our house on Limehouse Street in Charleston, SC, and I moved to a barrier island called Folly Beach, the most bohemian of Charleston’s beaches. I live on the backside facing the Folly River in a small one-story, two-bedroom bungalow propped on pilings, but my study faces the front of the house because I don’t want the constant Darwinian dissonance of pelican plummet – splash – or the baby-butchering sounds of raccoon sex — or the insect-like buzz of  jet skis to distract me as I try to put into words what is happening.

After the amputation, which I prefer to call dismemberment, I retired from my job as the arts editor at the paper and became a househusband, which drove both Gwen and Bronwyn crazy. Did I mention I am a smoker? An occupational hazard in journalism and a must-not for diabetics. Of course, I smoked outside on the verandas (there were two, one upstairs, one downstairs) running along the front the house (whose side faced the street in typical Charleston fashion), but even my smoking on the porches irritated spouse and daughter. Also, I had erectile issues, not-exercising issues, Jameson whiskey issues (another diabetic no-no); nevertheless, Gwen’s affair with the vapid spike-haired Brandon I could have not imagined; her moving out on me and in with him after 22 years of marriage seemed almost goddamned cartoonish. In this case life imitates unimaginative romantic comedies.

Milton’s Satan, one of my boyhood heroes, says that “sometimes solitude is best society,” and I get plenty of it now, but I do every afternoon, depending on my mood and/or the weather, visit one of two Folly Bars, Chico Feo or The Jack of Cups. 

 

Chico Feo is right across Second Street East from Berts, a small grocery store that’s been in operation for 60 years. I guess you could call Chico Feo an alfresco dining experience featuring Caribbean cuisine or a funky drinking establishment without a roof. It’s in the backyard of an old un-air-conditioned two-story house where they prepare the food, goat curry, beans and rice, tacos.  The bar forms a barrier to the back door of the house where the kitchen is located. Beers are retrieved from coolers, or rather, large ice-filled tubs. Throughout the day whatever bartender’s on duty — Charlie, Tyler, Paul, or Greg — makes the trek across the street to Bert’s to procure more ice.

Chico Feo is only six blocks from my house, so I ride my bike, adding to the island’s quirky charm, a one-legged man with a notebook in his hand peddling a mountain bike on a flat barrier island. By the way, prosthetic legs have come a long way since Flannery O’Connor’s Hulga stumped her way up into the hayloft and into the arms of Manly Pointer. I opted for functionality rather than cosmetics in choosing mine, which I have rather pompously christened “Ahab,” though if you check out this link on eBay, you can find some pretty tempting vintage models, advertised with élan: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/prosthetic-leg

From my private collection :

Rare german steampunk vintage pre WW1 (about 1900 – 1910)  leather wooden foot with metal spring!

Very rare steampunk collectible – stay like this or do some restoation work on it for art design, museum collection or just an outstanding weird item for home design

outside leather is in very good condition for it’s (sic) age, rust on metal braces , inside of socket worn out and very used .

an unique item!

of course not for medical use !!!

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Anyway, I usually wear long pants, unless temperature tops 90 or so, and though I admire those who flaunt their prosthetics, like Paul McCartney’s ex-wife, I’m also a great admirer of Ray Charles, whose dark glasses shielded children from at least one awful truth.

The Jack of Cups, my other hang out, is a small brew pub that features kickass Thai-like cuisine, though the owners/chefs are very white people from Santa Monica, as nice as they can be, and very talented when it comes to cooking.

I’m there right now, talking to one of the bartenders, Fiona, an articulate, culturally aware young woman with gorgeous wavy red hair, very pale freckled skin, and prominent hazel eyes that chameleon like change colors from light brown to green. She’s originally from Savannah, and although I wouldn’t quite yet call her Rubenesque, she’s headed in that direction. She actually edited the literary magazine at Bowdoin, has published poetry in on-line journals. We end up talking about Devon, an aspiring fiction writer who works at Berts.

“So, what you working on, Jake?” she says as I turn the page of a manuscript.

“It’s not mine. It belongs to Devon. It’s his latest novel.

Fiona rolls her eyes, adds a theatrical sneer.

Devon is a very upbeat young African American in his early twenties with excellent facial features but who is uncomfortably overweight. If one day Fiona might be Rubenesque, Richard is already giving Sydney Greenstreet a run for his money. Apparently, he spends every moment off work writing (and eating). When he talks about his latest project, he goes manic, as if you might be as interested in his made-up world as he is, which makes him a very poor conversationalist for a practitioner of WORN. He’s not interested in anything else but his “art,”  not sports, not politics.  I don’t think he’s ever asked me a personal question like “how did you happen to lose that leg?”

Sydney Greenstreet

Sydney Greenstreet

“You poor, stiff,” Fiona says. “You should’ve just said no. Let me be your role model, pal. When he asked me, I said, ‘no way, amigo, no can do,’ and believe me, he can take no for an answer.”

“Well, I am a man of some leisure, and I told him I’d be brutally honest, which I intend to be.”

“Yeah, and you don’t have to worry about any potential romantic delusions he might harbor  Anyway, What’s it about?”

“It’s sort of hard to explain. I just started it. Two paragraphs in. But according to him, it’s actually a video game, the plot of the novel is a video game, and like those choose-your-adventure books, you – the reader – can opt where to go, to skip 50 pages ahead if you decide to go to a movie, or instead of that, drop some LSD and jump 150 pages ahead.  He fantasizes that they’ll make it into a movie and then ultimately into a video game.”

“Sounds fucked-up. Delusional. Unpublishable.”

“It’s not the plot but the prose I’m dreading.”

“Well, sweetheart, I’ll let you get back to your reading,” she says wiping off the bar. Fiona’s writing a dissertation on film noir and has started to parrot the lingo of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

“Thanks,” I say, and start over reading the manuscript.

 

[1] Actually, we’re reading Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad, which, though a tad bit sing-songy and cloyingly melancholy, is age appropriate for both of us:

 

         Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

         Is hung with bloom along the bough,

         And stands about the woodland ride

          Wearing white for Eastertide.

 

         Now, of my threescore years and ten,

         Twenty will not come again,

         And take from seventy springs a score,

         It only leaves me fifty more.

 

         And since to look at things in bloom

         Fifty springs are little room,

         About the woodlands I will go

         To see the cherry hung with snow.

A Taste of Folly

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hoodoo headquarters

Outside of Hoodoo Headquarters

11: 10 a.m. Saturday 16 January 2016

As the sun arcs across the bluest of skies on this glorious Saturday of a three-day weekend, why squander my benevolent mood by overturning the rock of US politics and commenting on the spectacle of the scurrying vermin underneath?

Let’s not go into Trump and Cruz bouncing off the ropes of Thursday’s debate delivering forearms and leg kicks like Jessie Ventura and Nikolai Volkkoff.

Let’s not revisit the pairing of Lindsey Graham and Jeb! standing awkwardly abreast at yesterday’s endorsement like Muff and Jeff .

jeb and lindsey

photoshopped cartoon by WLM3

And what about this century’s remake of the 1972 Democratic contest with Hillary Clinton in the role of Edward Muskie and Bernie Sanders playing George McGovern?[1]

Enough! Already I feel dyspepsia roiling the previously pacific pools of my stomach acid.

No, I’m headed to the closet to don my pith helmet for another episode of “Hoodoo Anthropology.” Today, my adopted hometown Folly Beach celebrates its annual culinary extravaganza a “Taste of Folly, which I’ve never checked out, so I’m curious to see what type of crowd the festival attracts. You would think attendees might be a bit more subdued than the roisterers who descend for Folly Gras and Follypalloza, but frankly, I dunno.

What I do know is that the streets have been cordoned off, draught beer is flowing from sidewalk taps, and, of course, the chefs of Folly have taken extra care to present their signature dishes.

1:30 pm

Your intrepid reporter/anthropologist (IRA) and his spouse/assistant (SA) park their bikes at Chico Feo. Charlie, bartender extraordinaire, informs them that a bluegrass trio will be performing at 5, and that the owner/proprietor/chef (OPC) Hank Weed has set up a station offering a taste of Chico on the main drag that bisects this seaside community.

We cover the block to Center Street on foot.

IMG_2495

Over time, your IRA has developed mild anxiety when enmeshed in the amoeba-like pulsations of a crowd. SA Birdsong is hungry, a happy coincidence, but the lines for food are long along the bustling thoroughfare. As luck would have it, the queue for the Jack of Cup’s (JOC) curry is manageable, so the two split up; SA Birdsong procures two bowls while IRA goes inside the saloon to obtain a beer.

As sometimes happens in small villages, sitting right outside of the JOC are two friends, Larry and Jed, who offer an area of the table where SA and IRA can stand and enjoy the absolutely delicious combination of rice, potatoes, curry, peppers, etc.

curry.jpg

Jack of Cups Curry

Since Larry has been on site since “the crack of eleven,” he has procured a wristband that allows him to transport beers as a pedestrian.

wrist band

“Since when do you need a wristband to drink at a Folly festival?” IRA asks.

“It’s new this year,” Larry says. “It’s not too bad. Costs a buck. They make it efficient.”

“Maybe so, “ IRA thinks, “but here’s another instance of government complicating the lives of citizens.” He wonders where Cruz, Trump, and Bush might stand on the issue.  No doubt nanny staters Bernie and Hillary are all for it.

As IRA enjoys his beer, someone approaches him from the back and begins to tenderly massage his shoulders. Out loud IRA wonders who it might be — Emmylou Harris? Chrissie Hynde? Margo Timmins? Ambrosia Parsley?

No, it’s Vinnie Folly Beach’s most prolific songwriter.

vinny

Vinnie

“You know what,” Vinnie says, “I’m going to get drunk today.”

IRA: “You are?”

Vinnie [emphatically]: “Yes I am. You know why?”

IRA: “Nope.”

Vinnie: “Because I got drunk last night, and I can’t get over it.”

Two beers are long enough for IRA to determine that the visitors for a Taste of Folly are very much like the visitors to the other festivals. Bands play, like at any other festival. There’s a Jump Castle (JC) for the kiddies, like at any other festival.

Bottom line: the festival goers seem to be having a fairly good time.

3:41

SA and IRA arrive home safely via bikes. Decompression time before Chico Feo 5pm bluegrass trio.

[1] Dream tickets: Sanders and Sharpton vs. Cruz and Cotton in a “the-center-cannot-hold” contest.

From Summerville to Folly Beach: Tales of Intoxication

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Folly Beach Tales of Intoxication

Trigger warning: The following post tells the story of the first time I got drunk and mentions common topics of intoxication like lying to one’s mother, entertaining foolish possibilities, dancing on tables, and vomiting a retainer-like false tooth out of the window of a moving Oldsmobile going at least 70 mph on an Interstate Highway.

Here’s the sad story of the first time I got drunk, a tale of self-inflicted woe, a narrative featuring Brazilian exchange students and bad choices galore.

It occurred on a Saturday night in the late fall of 1969 when three Summerville High juniors and two Brazilian exchange students decided to skip the parent-sanctioned dance at the American Legion Hut and head to Folly Beach for some more sophisticated fun. My pal – I’ll call him Arthur – had connections, could get us in a Citadel Senior Party. We’d be posing as college students from Wofford in a daring act of James-Bond-like subterfuge [cue 007 guitars].

I was all for the change in venue, Folly Pier trumping American Legion Hut for sure. And who knows — it was not out of the realm of possibility — I could conceivably find myself in the arms of some jaded older almost-woman and receive backseat tutelage in the arts of love — about which I had only the slightest of cinematic clues.

It was possible. That very July we had put a man on the moon.

None of us were at the legal beer drinking age of eighteen at the time, but in Summerville in those days, that was not, as the sales clerks say, a problem. If you were tall enough to be able place a quarter and a dime on the counter of S_______’s Grocery, Mr. S________ himself would go back to the cooler and procure for you a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, place it in a brown paper sack, and presto — fun ahoy! – off you drove.

Our driver was the late Gordon Wilson, a capital fellow, and my other friend — I’ll call him Gene — was someone I’d known for so long we’d been playpen mates.

Two Brazilian exchange students, Paulo and Jacó, who were staying with Gordon, also accompanied us. As it turned out, these two would be our saviors, or at least Jacó would. Thanks to his anti-samba sobriety, his reckoning of his own safety, he volunteered to chauffeur us home (despite not having a valid South Carolina driver’s license).

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Sure, he got confused about which way to go and got us stuck for a while in a sand dune, but with the help of Good Samaritans, we – make that the Samaritans — somehow extracted the Olds, and we made it home, not only alive/unparalyzed, but in my case, undetected by my parents, even though the doors were locked and I had to crawl through a window (and in my condition my locomotion would make Buster Keaton look like Rudolf Nureyev).  

Okay, I’d be lying if I tried to turn the party into a coherent narrative.

Montage time:

Inside the Folly Pier. Bright lights. Beach music. Citadel cadets, their dates. Bottle-guzzling. Flirting. What you see when looking down from a table you’re dancing on at a Citadel Senior Party.

Slipping and falling and getting up laughing.

Now, I’m in the car. After a long time of not, the car is moving. What’s his name’s driving. We’re going fast. I’m puking out of the window.

I awake, not unlike despair-racked Satan on the burning lake of fire in Paradise Lost; only, actually, I’m in my bed in my underwear and desert boots.

tA7UmXb

No need for montage here. I remember all too clearly.   It felt like someone had jabbed and twisted a screwdriver in the base of my brain after water boarding me during my unconsciousness with bile from Jackie Gleason’s liver.

I vaguely remembered something about my tooth missing. I felt with my hand. No, it wasn’t in my mouth, nor on the dresser, nor in either pocket of my wadded up Levis. Not in the front pocket of my vomit besplattered shirt, whose smell almost prompted a heave. No, my fake tooth was long gone, runover, crushed, obliterated somewhere along the shoulder of I-26.

16-year-old-despair.

I’ve never liked lying, and I’m not good at it. But on this occasion I lied to my mother. I told her I had gotten sick at the dance (technically true) and gone out to vomit (technically true) and lost my tooth somewhere outside the American Legion Hut (patently false).*

She asked me if I had been drinking.

“No ma’am.”

The American Legion Hut in Summerville
The American Legion Hut in Summerville

She went to look for the tooth because I was in no shape to. I felt fearful and wretchedly guilty, my mother on a Sunday morning scavenging in vain among the discarded beer cans and cigarette butts in the grass of the yard of the American Legion Hut.

The next week, though, Mama got her revenge and tricked me into telling the truth.

The following Saturday, Gordon and I stayed out to 2 am, and when he pulled up to my house, I said. “I sure hope my parents are asleep.”

Like I said, Gordon was a capital fellow. He smiled and said, “Isn’t that them sitting there?”

There, there, very there, as Iago sort of says in Othello, sitting in lawn chairs on the edge of the yard, the tips of their cigarettes glowing orange dots. Gordon let me out without pulling into the driveway, and after offering a meek wave to my parents, drove off down Dogwood Circle.

No, I had not been drinking. I blew into their faces my untainted breath, whose purity did practically nothing to abate my father’s fury. He kicked me in the back of my legs as I walked up the steps. Mama told me that Gordon’s mother had told her Gordon had gotten drunk last week and so had I. I fell for it, cursed Gordon’s mother, which resulted in an “ah-ha!” Mama said she had made that up to trick me. Now I think of it, she probably was lying herself, covering for Mrs. Wilson.

Lies beget lies.

My punishment: I was told that I could no longer be me. I had to start dressing like a preppy and to change my attitude.

But, of course, that was impossible. Like Bob Dylan had sung in that record going on ten years old, I was beyond their command. I did, though, have to go to school without a false front tooth for a month. Being a redhead and freckled, I looked like a skinny Alfred E Neuman. (By the way, that’s actually my head photoshopped on the male hula-hooping dancer on the comic).

AlfredENewmanHippy
Rusty

So I did suffer for my sins and still feel guilty for sending my mother on that wild goose chase. Let’s not forget that “The evil that men boys do live after them./The good is oft interred with their bones.”

*See first comment below.

Folly Beach Life, Ain’t the Good Life, But It’s My Life

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Eddie Cabbage

Eddie Cabbage

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.

zoom ivy

And here be the Screamin’ J’s

Folly Beach’s Cat Lady, Potential Serial Killer?

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Greetings From Folly Beach, SC

Greetings From Folly Beach, SC

There’s a high profile, eccentric old lady on Folly Beach whom I encounter practically every day feeding feral cats. I’d say she’s in her mid-to-late 80s, and even if you were to straighten out her stoop, she wouldn’t hit 4’10.” Not surprisingly, people who don’t know her name – and I don’t – call her the Cat Lady.

Every block or so she has placed plastic containers, and every afternoon feral cats gather in anticipation of her arrival. Sometimes, she has a helper, but on most days when I see her, she is alone, wearing an expression of great seriousness as she leans over dumping dry cat food into the bowls. In fact, I saw her this afternoon when I was headed to Chico Feo for a pre-supper malted aperitif. Staring off into space, she had her hands on her hips, like a diminutive, determined, female edition of General Patton. Obviously, this diurnal “mission trip” is her raison d’etre.

Of course, feeding feral cats is an environmental no-no. According to FETA (not exactly an anti-animal organization):

Many people who encounter feral cats start feeding them, but feeding alone can actually make the situation worse. Feeding ferals increases their ability to give birth to even more kittens who are destined to suffer and die premature deaths. It is essential to get these cats off the streets in order to prevent not only their own suffering, but that of their offspring. Feeding should only be done as a prelude to trapping, to get cats accustomed to eating in a certain place at a certain time.

The article goes on to state that feral cats have abbreviated life spans, suffer from a multitude of maladies thanks to non-vaccination, and even if their autism rates are super low (I just made that up), the food can also attract non-feline varmints. The Cat Lady learned this the hard way last year when a rabid raccoon took a chunk out of her, an event so newsworthy it made the Charleston papers.

Folly Beach is certainly no “Mayberry by the Sea” – its official civic moniker is the Edge of America – but even after the coon attack, the authorities, Sheriff-Taylor-like, look the other way as she putts along in her cart circumnavigating the island. Maybe they figure what the hell, stopping her would kill her, so what if scores of cats suffer or some surfer comes down with a case of rabies? Sometimes targeted human compassion trumps common sense, and going by Haruki Murakami’s brilliant novel Kafka on the Shore, feral cats dig the freedom of homelessness.

ILLUSTRATION BY SAM BOSMA

ILLUSTRATION BY SAM BOSMA from The New Yorker

One of the characters in the novel, Satoru Nakata, through circumstances too complex to relate here, has obtained the ability to converse with cats. People hire him to find their lost pets. Nakata usually begins his investigations in city parks where the ferals hang. In one incident, he strikes up a conversation with a stray and asks the cat his name. “I used to have one when I lived with people,” the cat says, “but I’ve forgotten what it was.” You get the idea [absurd mixed-animal-metaphor-cliché alert] that wild horses couldn’t drag him back to domestication.

 

I’ll admit that the Cat Lady has irritated me on occasion, blocking my path when I’m running late, but even if her head isn’t in the right place, her heart certainly is. Nevertheless, I sense something sinister about her, so for fun, I’m outlining a murder mystery set on Folly in which she’s a serial killer. What’s really enjoyable is deciding whom among the people on Folly I don’t like she murders, in what order, and how. Hey, it’s summer time. It keeps me off the streets, safe from a potential attack by a mad, foaming calico.

Fat Tuesday

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history1It’s Fat Tuesday in the Protestant State of South Carolina, so not much is going on carnivalwise except on Folly Beach, which celebrates Fat/Shrove Tuesday not in the context of the Christian calendar but as another excuse to lure consumers onto the island so they can get rip-roaring drunk. This lack of a Catholic context is underscored by Folly’s postponing its big celebration — Folly Gras — until the more pecuniarily advantageous weekend, this Saturday, the fourth day of Lent.*

*When this post was published in 2015, Follygras was still a thing.  It was banned in 2019 because, as they say, things for out-of-hand.

Folly Gras 2019 1.0

The origins of Carnival are obscure; some anthropologists tie the festivities to the ancient Italian tradition of Bacchanalia (see Livy for some hyper-ventilated descriptions of the festivities) while others dismiss the connection as spurious. Etymologically, most agree that carne — meat — comprises to the root for the celebration, which features feasting and in some cases nudity — chili con carne and carnal knowledge.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria

Sophie Tucker

Sophie Tucker

The ancient celebration of Bacchanalia embraced — if Livy can be believed — a leveling of the social playing field, allowing plebeians to run free through the streets mixing with their so-called social superiors, and Carnival’s tendency for disguise might be akin to this earlier democratization of social hierarchy. Who is that behind that elaborate mask, Rush Limbaugh or the Leatherman, Queen Victoria or Sophie Tucker?

Although I’m not Catholic nor have given up anything for Lent since the ’60’s, I like the counterbalancing of Carnival and Lent as mythic antitheses — each in its way helping us to come to terms with death and therefore life.

Between extremities

Man runs his course;

A brand, or flaming breath.

Comes to destroy

All those antinomies

Of day and night;

The body calls it death,

The heart remorse.

But if these be right

What is joy?

 Yeats “Vacillation”

So, on that bright note, I’m headed down to Center Street to see what’s going down.  Who knows, maybe the Leatherman will show up.

The Leatherman

The Leatherman

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Chico Feo, TS Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Lost Souls, & I-and-I

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For whatever perverse reason, I prefer dives to tony bars and restaurants. The same goes for neighborhoods. You couldn’t pay me to live on Kiawah or Daniel Island. The manicured bicycle paths, the antiseptic standards of what is allowed architecturally, the non-diversity of income and outlook, and the bland, vowel-less intonations of their residents and tourists would produce in me fogbanks of despair.

Nor would I want to live in an upstate mill village where all the small clapboard houses have the same floor plan and everyone twangs vocally the verbal equivalent of out-of-tune banjo strings.

No, what I like is diversity, the mixed neighborhoods of the Upper Peninsula and the non-gated barrier islands. So I’m very happy here on Folly where a million dollar house might stand next to quaint cottage or a ramshackle two-story paint-peeling survivor of Hurricane Hugo, happy to live in a community where trick-or-treating is forbidden because the poorly lighted streets have no sidewalks and vehicular traffic can be, well, unsteady.

Like the various options in housing on Folly, the island also offers a variety of drinking and eating establishments, and since the closing of the Brew Pub on Center Street, my favorite hangout is Chico Feo, an outdoor Caribbean “restaurant” whose limited menu consists of curried goat, Dominican beans, or shark or pork tacos. In the unlikely case you’re an old-time Charlestonian, think Captain Harry’s without walls or a roof. Like Captain Harry’s, beers are sold out of coolers and the seats are not very comfortable.

Click the arrow in the frame above for a panoramic pan of Chico Feo

Counting the left turn onto Second Street, Chico Feo lies a mere six blocks from my house, so I ride my bike there, weaving my way through the clogged cars of day trippers to enjoy a brew or two beneath the overarching trees – and maybe, just, maybe, to knock off six or so essays.

Yesterday, however, I left my stack of essays at home [‘”Argue that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be read as the debunking of stereotypes found in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden”‘] and carried with me instead Hugh Kenner’s 1964 book TS Eliot: The Invisible Poet, my journal, and a trusty pen.

Chico Feo attracts locals – a homeless man named Greg, surfers in their late twenties and beyond, musicians, C of C alums/dropouts who never left (damn them), and Folly residents like me – and, yes, many of us are indeed “ugly boys” in keeping with the English translation of the bar’s Spanish name.

After the bartender Charlie provided me with my Bell’s IPA, I found an empty table with a view of Second Street where I could watch locomotive skateboarders with backpacks glide past the mural of Bert the Pirate that graces his iconic market, or I could cast my critical eyes on the never ending parade of pedestrians headed either to or from the beach.

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Yesterday, inside the friendly confines – and Chico Feo is incredibly friendly – the bar was occupied with an eclectic group of imbibers: a limping, bearded 50-something sporting a straw cowboy hat, a slender long haired surfer dude, and a group of already-over-the-hill 20-somethings with expanding hips and incipient beer bellies.

On the large picnic table a tableaux of young, middle class hedonists bowed down looking at their cell phones in the attitude of prayer. The temperature was perfect, and the onshore breeze provided a bit of respite from the gnats.

So I opened Kenner’s book and began a chapter devoted to the philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley’s influence on Eliot’s thought and came upon this passage:

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts and feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside, and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it [. . .] In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

I looked up from that passage and caught sight of one of the most grotesque human beings I’ve ever encountered.

Where to begin?

The words “obese” and “corpulent” don’t begin to do justice to this shambling Rabelaisian, Falstaffian 400-pound 25-year-old. All he wore was a pair of board shorts that clung precariously an inch or two below the broad expanse of the Brobdingnagian belly that sagged and quivered with every painful, bare-footed step he took on sun-blistered feet and legs. I’ll forego a description of his breasts – let it suffice to say they drooped the way you might imagine Mae West’s drooping in her Myra Breckinridge era. I could see from where I was sitting that he was stoned or tripping or worse.

I returned to Kenner ‘s take on TS when I heard, “Hey, man, how’s it going?”

My deafness has gotten so bad that I didn’t even notice that the giant had pulled up at my table.

I looked up, and there he was sitting, his blue eyes as vacant as a Detroit warehouse, glazed, abnormal.

He commenced a monologue of his surreal misadventures of the previous 24 hours, which I’ll summarize as briefly as possible.

Someone had offered him an LSD-laced drink because they wanted to kill him because he had come here from Kentucky to make and sell art, i.e., sun hats made out of palmetto fronds. They had drugged him, and he had passed out on the beach. He was supposed right now to be with some “sweet honey” from Summerville [I’m ashamed to admit I tried to imagine what contortions must take place to achieve heterosexual intercourse with this man], but now he’s lost her forever, and he remembers the night before gaining consciousness in a restroom downtown washing his hands and screaming, “The water is scalding my hands!”

I patiently listened as I sipped my beer, nodded my head sympathetically, muttered an occasional, “wow-that-sucks.” Finally, when the beer was done, I bid him good-bye and wished him better luck.

Alienation – the great theme of 20th century literature – “every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it” – or as Marlow puts it in Heart of Darkness, “No it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation in any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes the truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone.”

Or as Eliot himself puts it in “The Waste Land” :

I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison . .

The image that stays with me is that of those friends around the picnic table together but apart, prayerfully bowing their heads as they stared into their cell phones – an image of our times.

 

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