WC Fields

A Relatively Modest (If I Say So Myself) Promotional Article on My Just-About-to-Be- Published Novel “Today, Oh Boy” in Which I Compare It to Joyce’s “Ulysses” and the Paintings of the Flemish Master Pieter Breughel the Elder[1]

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Painting of the cover of Today, Oh Boy by David Boatwright

My novel Today, Oh Boy, which is supposed to appear in early September of 2022, takes place during the daylight hours of Monday 12 October 1970 in Summerville, South Carolina. The title comes from the Beatle classic “A Day in the Life” as does the epigraph of Book 1, “Surfaces” –

And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

A mango-hued, pockmarked bulletin board hangs on a classroom wall of pale lime green concrete blocks, the bulletin board pencil-stabbed and compass point-gouged. Among the graffiti are the names of the star-crossed lovers: Sandy + Tripp. Tragic Tripp, whose body was found last week tangled in blackberry bushes along the banks of the Ashley River, his skull smashed after falling off Bacons Bridge.

S-A-N-D-Y + T-R-I-P-P.

Rusty Boykin, a skinny, freckled redhead sitting on the bulletin board row in Mrs. Laban’s homeroom, traces his index finger in the depression of Sandy’s name. He supposes it’s Tripp’s work – the letters inartistic, juvenile. Sandy hasn’t been to school since Tripp’s death, four class days ago, and now it’s Monday, and she’s still not here. She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist.

For Rusty and his friends Alex Jensen and Will Waring, Tripp’s death, though “rather sad,” is less than heartbreaking because he was a belligerent bully with a ferocious temper. Despite that the word “tragic” appears in its second sentence, Today, Oh Boy is a comic novel.

Now, no way am I comparing this trifle of mine to Joyce’s Ulysses; however, I got the idea of writing it after listening to a 38-cd audio version of Joyce’s novel, that is, the idea of writing a novel that features one day in the life of a community with a wide cross-section of citizens. The chapter of Ulysses that especially intrigued me has come to be known as “Wandering Rocks.”

Here’s Julia Galeota’s summary from the Yale University’s Campus Press website:

“The Wandering Rocks,” the tenth episode of James Joyce‘s Ulysses relates the activities of citizens in the streets of Dublin between three and four o’clock. Composed exclusively of nineteen short vignettes that feature collectively nearly all of the characters of Ulysses, this tenth of Joyce’s eighteen episodes “is both an entr’acte between the two halves and a miniature of the whole” (Blamires 93).

Here’s a snippet, the last paragraph of “Wandering Rocks”:

Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H. Thrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F. Stevenson, C. Adderly, and W. C. Huggard started in pursuit. Striding past Finn’s hotel, Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr E. M. Solomons in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate. Deep in Leinster street, by Trinity’s postern, a loyal king’s man, Horn-blower, touched his tallyho cap. As the glossy horses pranced by Merrion square Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent with the topper and raised also his new black cap with fingers greased by porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up. The viceroy, on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital, drove with his following towards Lower Mount street. He passed a blind stripling Opposite Broadbent’s. In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain. On Northumberland and Landsdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849, and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

And my pale imitation:

On the north side of South Carolina Highway 17-A just around a curve from a two-story high school, a redheaded sixteen-year-old boy in a silk-screened blue jean jacket walks backward with his thumb thrust out. Inside the school, another sixteen-year-old boy, this one dark-haired and wearing wirerimmed glasses, translates a passage from Don Quixote. A mile and a half to the east as the crow flies, a basset hound[2] with a red collar zigzags his way toward Bacons Bridge Road, a route that merges with Highway 61, crosses the Ashley River, then runs parallel to the river through a scenic tunnel of moss-draped oaks where antebellum plantations and gardens attract tourists in the spring. Meanwhile in one of the growing housing developments just outside the quaint town of Summerville, a middle-aged woman in a pink robe fills a tomato-stained glass with tap water and leaves it in the sink. Back at the school, a younger, plumper woman chastises a hyper Jewish kid with braces. Another set of ancient oaks embower a driveway where a maroon VW bus and a white VW bug follow one another out onto Carolina Avenue in the verdant heart of Old Summerville. Back at the school, two students are putting their art supplies away in anticipation of the end of class while a red Mustang hurtles in the opposite direction of—and past—the redheaded hitchhiker. The Mustang slams on brakes, does a screeching, tire-smoking 180, and slides to a stop in the opposite lane. Startled, the redheaded boy does a nervous little Chaplinesque dance as electricity whiplashes in a rush up his spine. He suddenly realizes that it’s her car, hears her New Jersey accent calling his name, asking him where he’s headed, inviting him to hop on in, and he begins to run toward the passenger side door. Around the curve at the school, a series of electric bells go

RRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNG!!!

and a tall, slender math student picks up her things to head to English while on the first floor directly under her classroom, an orange-haired typist clumsily removes a sheet of onion paper from a typewriter that has seen better days.

A couple of pre-publication readers, the brilliant Cintra Wilson the most prominent, complained that despite that the novel’s funny and stylistically sophisticated, it suffers from an overload of characters and too many sudden shifts, though sudden shifts shouldn’t, I would think, bother readers who grew up on Sesame Street. After all, Book 1 is called “Surfaces,” which attempts to provide portraitures of the classes of people who made up Late 60s Summerville High – jocks; a handful of selected African Americans; college prep kids, non-college-bound home economics, shop, and agriculture students; a small but ascendant number of “hippies;” and the teachers who taught them – which brings to mind the paintings of my artistic hero Pieter Breughel the Elder who overloaded his canvases with a glut of personages. You could also say that about my Photoshopped faux paintings.

At any rate, I hope you buy the novel and more importantly enjoy it. We’re in the process of planning a launch at Buxton’s Books and hope to have events at independent Summerville bookstores as well.

[1] I must have fallen asleep during the writing-workshop lesson on crafting brisk, attention-grabbing titles. By the way, in case you suffer from Irony Deficiency, that I used a first-person pronoun four times in the title playfully suggests that the article will not be modest.

[2] The basset hound, Hambone Odysseus Macy, is off on an epic adventure of his own. He’s later picked up from the side of the road by Alex Jensen who rechristens him Mr. Peabody after the erudite dog from the Bullwinkle cartoon. References to comic figures abound in the novel. In fact, one of the teachers, Colonel Claude Toby Dukenfield, shares the same name with WC Fields, on whom he based.

Being of Two Minds: Dionysian Edition

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Molenaer, Jan Miense – Battle Between Carnival and Lent

One of the recompenses of old age – and believe me they are few – is that getting rip-roaring, intestine-unloading, word-slurring, sidewalk-reeling drunk has lost its allure.[1]

Oh, Lawd, my geriatric muse, Erratatata has descended:

Dionysius, boon companion of my youth,

has grown so very long in the tooth

that he looks like Nosferatu,

like, like bad, bad juju.

Before
After

Nevertheless, even though my days of dancing-on-tables, driving-MGs-down-parking-garage-steps have long passed, I still enjoy checking out Folly Beach’s party scene, to engage tiara sporting brides-to-be and their uniformed entourages in conversation.[2] I also enjoy making small talk with the young men at Chico Feo or Low Life who share adjacent barstools.  I relish shooting the shit, as my father might put it, with many of the bartenders whom I consider more than acquaintances.

But only for an hour or two. Too many Founders Day IPAs makes Wesley a dyspeptic codger.

Nevertheless, I tip my fedora to those old sybarites who never forsake the temporary comforts of strong drink, the Sir Toby Belches and T. Frothingill Bellows of the world, who belly up to the bar and have at it until the day they started to drink becomes the morrow or until their livers eventually give out.[3]

the great WC Fields

Yet, ultimately, forgive the cliché, but home is where the heart is. There’s nothing I’d rather do than sit on the deck with Caroline on a gnat-less late afternoon and look out over the river at the light maturing, going golden, and ultimately dying, then sitting down to dinner with Brooks and rehashing the day’s trivial events, which all and all make up most of our lives.

Now, as some of us used to say in the 60s, that is where it’s at.

[1] Of course, the cliché “with age comes wisdom” is somewhat true. I say “somewhat” because the wisdom of perspective, of the long view, i.e., the road map that experience provides, is merely two-dimensional. For example, I’ve learned in my old age that acute intoxication comes at a cost not worth paying, but that revelation isn’t exactly profound – it’s not as if I’ve embraced the Four Noble Truths and eliminated desire from my mental makeup, not as if I have achieved the serenity that a life of virtue provides. I still occasionally slip up and get drunk, though that’s never my goal.

Anyway, if old age provides wisdom, how come so many of my senescent brethren wear scowls instead of sport beatific smiles? I’ll tell you why, because their joints ache, they’re lonely, the world is going to hell in a handbasket as it has been since time immemorial, i.e., since the discovery of agriculture, Eden’s end.

[2] In which I offer sage advice like “monogamy is the cornerstone of a non-violent marriage” and “if you get caught in undertow, swim parallel to the shore.”

[3] Sir Toby of Twelfth Night and T. Frothingill Bellows, the protagonist of WC Fields’s The Big Broadcast of 1938.

Work Stoppage (Or the Wages of Sloth)

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from the Smithsonian Art Museum

In the summer of 1972, I went to work for Flack Jones Lumber because it was one of three establishments in Summerville that hired longhairs. To say I was an unskilled laborer would be an understatement. Driving a nail, much less running a power saw, transcended my meager talents, so I ended up bouncing around the lumberyard on a truck driven by a Black man who went by the name of Hambone.  We performed odd jobs like moving stacks of boards and shoveling sawdust. Hambone, who had crinkly cottony hair beneath his green hardhat, was a man of few words, but I do remember his making this pronouncement one blistering June afternoon: “When I was young, I couldn’t wait to knock off work so I could go fishin’. Now I can’t wait to knock off so I can get me a drink of liquor.”

Surprisingly, my White coworkers were cordial, given that the early Seventies were fraught with clashes between blue collar laborers and longhairs, especially in the Deep South. Once a fellow who looked Scots-Irish asked if I thought a man’s hair could grow as long as a woman’s.

My hair was red, so I stood out like a sore thumb WC Fields’ nose. 

“I reckon so,” I said.

I recall one particularly irksome task. Armed with a shovel blade, I crawled beneath a power saw and filled a plastic bucket with sawdust and then crawled out to dump the sawdust in a designated pile, and then crawled back under to repeat this labor until all the sawdust had been removed. Shortly thereafter, I decided Flack Jones wasn’t for me, though the hours were all right, Monday through Friday from 7 to 4.

I heard that Red and White, which also hired longhairs, had an opening, so I applied and was hired, joining my friends Joey Brown, David Kaczor, and Jim Collins bagging groceries, though actually Joey and David had worked their way up to stocking shelves. 

On my very first day, I got yelled at by the owner’s son for overloading a bag with canned goods, and twelve hours later, when tasked with mopping the floor, the owner’s son chided me for my poor technique and demonstrated how to move the mop head in circles. So, of course, I followed his lead, only to be confronted by the produce man John Henry who told me I was doing it all wrong and modeled for me an alternate technique. moving the mop in S-like patterns. As I’d move up and down the aisles mopping, I’d keep a look out for my two instructors and switch back and forth depending on who was passing my way, though I preferred John Henry’s method.

“Now, that’s more like it,” one or the other would say.

Working at Red and White was less grueling than working at Flack Jones, but the hours sucked – two twelve hour shifts on Fridays and Saturdays and every other Sunday with afternoon shifts on the other weekdays with Mondays and Wednesdays off.

So, I quit to take a pay cut to work at Carolina Home Furnishers, the third place that hired longhairs, where I mostly sat in a recliner and watched daytime TV with my boss Weeza, a benevolent overseer who called me “darling” and sent me to the liquor store around the corner in the afternoons.

It seems that she and Hambone were on the same page.

Yes, I was lazy that summer, not to mention vain, and unaccustomed to working, but my leisure days were over. At USC, I worked at Capstone cafeteria after classes on weekdays and on Saturday mornings and bused tables at the revolving restaurant Top of Carolina during Sunday Brunch. The pay was $1.15 an hour, but I got one free meal. After I graduated and entered grad school, I stopped working at the cafeteria to tend bar at the Golden Spur but continued to bus tables on Sundays until I dropped out to seek my fortune in the Lowcountry.

The rest, as they say, is history.

After Life’s Fitful Fever

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“Elegy: Blind Musician” by Mikhail Vasilevich (photoshopped by I-and-I)

. . . I need not rehearse
The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.

                                                                        Richard Wilbur, “A Late Aubade”

Although posthumous fame is essentially worthless to what Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger call the decedent,[1] humans tend to want to be remembered after their deaths, hence tombstones, epitaphs, and those memorial verses we find on obituary pages. As I have no doubt mentioned before, I actually enjoy reading the obituary page, even the obituaries of complete strangers. Perhaps it’s the poet in me who is interested in how the writer goes about compressing a life into the narrow confines of a column of newsprint.[2]  Generally, however, I skip the memorial verses, which are generally godawful jingles heavy on end rhyme.

For example, below you’ll find a bit of elegiac verse I copped from a publication called National Post. On its website, I found a page devoted to “Memorial Verses” with this option:

Choose a verse from the appropriate category. Alternatively you may want to copy and paste the verse into the place a notice order form. When placing a notice, please identify the verse by its number to your Classified Telesales Representative. You may also change any of the verses or write your own.

Conveniently, the editors have classified verses by relationships: “Mother, Sister, or Daughter; Father, Brother, or Son; Wife or Husband; Children; Friend or Kin; Armed Forces; Prayer Corner.”

Here’s the first choice listed for a mother.

A wonderful mother, woman and aide,
One who was better God never made;
A wonderful worker, so loyal and true,
One in a million, that mother was you.
Just in your judgment, always right;
Honest and liberal, ever upright;
Loved by your friends and all whom you knew
Our wonderful mother, that mother was you.

Of course, in my native state of South Carolina, not many would want to tar the woman who labored to bring them into the world with that vile word “liberal.” Last night during the debate between Nancy Mace and Joe Cunningham, the former used the word “democrat” and “liberal” as if they were synonymous with depravity.

Thank (in this case, given the diction of the verse) God that the purchaser has the option of changing the diction.

Just in your judgement, always right;

Honest and reactionary, ever upright. 

Indeed the alliteration in “right” and “reactionary” and “upright” is an auditory improvement. 

So it has occurred to me that in my retirement from teaching, I could make a few extra bucks composing memorial verses.

Let’s face it, almost anyone could do better than whoever wrote the above abomination.  I mean, the syntax of  “One who was better God never made” is so tortured it’s possibly in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Perhaps I could target sentimental agnostics and atheists who want their loved ones remembered, but less hyperbolically. 

Our mother has succumbed to a terminal disease,

A mother who taught us manners, to say “please”

And “thank you” and “may” instead of “can,”

Who raised us without the help of a man,

Our deadbeat dad who skipped town one night,

Forever disappearing in dishonorable flight.

Yet, Mom endured life’s hardships with stoic good grace,

An exemplary example for the human race.

Loved by her friends, her children, and pets,

We appreciate that she tried her very best.

Good night, deceased mother, may you rest in peace 

Safe in the cliché of death’s eternal sleep.

What do you think? Should I give it a try? Bill myself for the hours and then write it off my taxes? Anyway, if you’re in the market – fortune forbid – you know how to get in touch.

[1] This reminds me of a bit of dialogue from a WC Fields movie I ran across yesterday thanks to my pal Ballard Lesemann. A patron at a bar says to Fields, the bartender, “I understand you buried your wife a few years ago,” and Fields replies, “Yes, I had to. She was dead.”

[2] Unfortunately, I myself have become a somewhat prolific obituary writer, having composed posthumous bios for both my father and mother-in-law, my own parents, my maternal aunt and uncle, and for my beloved Judy Birdsong. The stylistic part is not easy. The memorialist needs to deftly insert introductory subordinate phrases and clauses to break the monotony of fact-filled declarative sentences.

On the Road to Curmudgeonry

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Although I don’t think my cantankerousness is robust enough to earn me the title of curmudgeon, I do, like everybody else, have my pet peeves. With any luck, however, as old age increasingly enfeebles me and the Charleston area accumulates more visitors and residents so that I am exposed to more and more Late Empire Americans, I may end up producing enough bile to earn the designation of curmudgeon and join the ranks of my beloved WC Fields, HL Mencken, and Winston Churchill.

WC Fields

WC Fields

To be a curmudgeon, I think you once had to be an idealist, an idealist who got taken, taken by a lover, a con artist, a pastor, or merely to summer camp against your will.

Also, Curmudgeons tend to be physically unattractive (see above list) since very attractive people have a much easier path in life. They get out of more speeding tickets, have more audience members pulling for them in game shows, enjoy more frequent admiring looks from strangers, etc. Of course, if you happen to be good-looking and long to be a curmudgeon, don’t despair. Old age will undoubtedly ameliorate that problem as these two before and after photos of Ginger Rogers demonstrate.

images mqdefault

In my case , I can’t blame falling short of curmudgeonry on rugged good looks or athletic prowess. No, I blame my wife Judy Birdsong for holding me down, providing me with love and care (not to mention family money) so that I’ve lived a prosperous, fulfilling life doing more or less as I please. It’s really hard to hate the world while you’re gazing out over a gorgeous river view

Now, if she had run off with the produce man at Piggly Wiggly or suffered from a shopping disorder or developed a penchant for crystal meth, I no doubt by this time be bitter enough to make Andy Rooney look like Mr. Rodgers.

Yet, I do have the potential. Just this afternoon as I rode my bike to the abandoned Coast Guard Station at the end of the island (sounds like a Hardy Boys’ adventure site), rather than enjoying the scenery, I found myself grumbling over a number of irritants from which a competent Buddhist would detach himself.

In fact, when I got home I compiled a list of my 9 most cherished irrational hatreds, and I thought I’d share them with you because, as they say, disgruntlement enjoys company. The list begins concretely but becomes more abstract as we hit home.

#9 – Golf carts on city streets, especially golf carts driven my attractive couples with black labs. I encountered 5 golf carts on my 6 mile ride, one of which I had to pass because it was going so slowly. I dunno, there’s something smug about puttering around on one of those goddamn things. I don’t mind the old crone who feeds the islands’ feral animals using one because she’s got to be at least 90 and probably is unable to operate an automobile, but the rest of you, get a blanking bicycle.

#8 Hummers – These monstrosities, the anti-golf carts, roar self-indulgence, scream fuck the planet, exude a menacing militarism that give drivers of Mini-Coopers like me the heebie-jeebies. Plus when they park next you, you need a periscope to back-up safely into traffic.

#7 Leaf blowers – gardening’s equivalent of the Hummer, these infernal replacers of the rake create a Dresden-scaled bombing assault on the ear drums of anyone a hundred yards away. Plus, they simply blow leaves into gutters or the woods without properly recycling them, robbing future generations of the pleasant aroma of burning leaves in autumn (and the occasional exciting newspaper story of someone’s house burning down).

#6 – Bottle rockets – These goddamn irritants ought to be illegal. Wait, on Folly they are illegal. Nevertheless, for hours on end on holidays, they’ll scream their way upward and pop their pops, sprinkle their colored fire, and terrify dogs, frogs, marsh birds, minks, otters, deer, and schizophrenics.

#5 – The sound and smell of dentists’ drills doing their work.

 

#4 – The idea that the greater the number of people praying for something, the more likely God will grant the prayers. For one thing, God is a monarch (that’s why he’s called Lord) not a little-d democrat. When little Bentley flips his three-wheeler and breaks his neck, I doubt if lighting up the switchboard of God’s consciousness is going to make a difference if Bentley recovers or not. It’s really not giving God too much credit, is it? I say pray, but pray for wisdom, guidance, “thy-will-be-done.”

#3 – Forcing people to use euphemisms. Hey, people, words that describe unpleasant phenomena take on negative connotations, and no matter how many euphemisms you come up with to replace those tainted words, their shelf-life of political correctness is going to be short. Already, I’m getting dirty looks whenever I describe my flip phone as “a special needs phone.”

#2 – Patriotic bumper stickers. This irritant seems to be less of a problem now that Obama is president. For whatever reason, I don’t see as many “Proud to Be an American” stickers brandished on the bumpers of pick-ups, but guess what, Daddy-O, if you had been born in Iran, you’d be proud to be an Iranian.

#1 – Numbered lists on the Internet like the 10 worst Movies no one should have to ever sit through again and my 9 most cherished irrational hatreds. That’s a meme that’s got to go. Use your imagination you hit-starved bloggers!

Well, dear readers, there you have it, my stab at curmudgeonry.