SKIMMING THE
GUMBO NUCLEAR "Facilis Descensus Averni" Chapter Eleven Kendra was congratulated down at the Chime's bar. All the other grad students commented on her professionalism. A guy she dated, a smooth-talking black-haired doctor who was doing he residency, had latched onto her and was not letting her go. They sat with the entourage while the Dash Riprocks headbanged onstage. Everybody indulged in the two-for-one kamikazes and a dozen oysters on the half shell, with horseradish ketchup and crackers sliding down their gullets. Kendra was still elegantly hot like Kathleen Turner. A sizzle of beauty, she was holding her liquor better than the Korean couple. Also too the Brazilian grad student Juan, whose gender bender affectation lent him to be engrossed by that ravishing lead singer up there with the short black hair. A boytoy for Juan, late of Portuguese descent and the decadence of Rio de Janeiro. Rumor had it his father had been Secretary of State in Rio, and they had a very influential family. Juan looked a lot like Tyrone Power. His smile and those obelisk eyes of gaiety were subject to picking up many hearty freshmen and taking them to the French Quarter. To the Gunga Din, or to see the Transvestites ladies at the Parade. Funbuns and "Which witch is the bitch" contests, where the bartender wore leather cowboy chaps and quivering buttocks coming out the back all the way down to the floor. Juan and Kendra made many forays into the Big Easy, Nawlins. They would go to the Rainbow or the Dungeon, to talk with the bikers. And those loose bars pollulating with queens. Old, artistic, lonely-eyed, alcoholic, healthy, butch and effeminate. Women and men, lesbians in comfortable shoes, tall men with mustaches named Mary, dykes with tough abrasive and masculine traits. The decadence of the smelly French Quarter was just an overall clue to what might happen to the entire state. AIDS wasn't the only thing to fear anymore, Kendra knew. But she didn't like to think about it. She was on schedule with her studies of these creatures. Her dissertation would be brilliant. And she was definitely in love with Dr. Chuck Miller, a veterinarian with the labradors and the swanky townhouse near college. She had always wanted to live in the garden district. She spent many nights at that townhouse just laying around. Spreading her radiant beauty like pollen through the windy streams of breezes wafting from the multi-painted porch and veranda overlooked the Yuppie swinger's pool graced by beckoned honeys and men that looked like fashion models. Kendra sipped her Tom Collins with THOSE pouty protruding lips that wouldn't end. Every single man in that raucous bar managed to look away from their shaved-head-on-the-side girlfriends to share at this blonde aryan wonder. "How did I look on TV?" she asked Juan the gay blade. Juan smiled and made a funny face and then pouted his lips. He said, "Darling, you are a star! If we could just get you in that pose? You have IT like Clara Bow, and you can keep it!" She hit him lightly and with purring sultriness a notch above whisky tenor, cooed, "I'm serious!" "You are Garbo, Dietrich, Tuesday Weld, Hayworth, and Louise Brooks too, mon vieux!" "I don't understand a screwing word you are saying. Just say yes or no!" He nodded yes exaggerating. Big bobs up and down as his ponytail flopped. "I know you could be a movie star. I always wanted to be one too. Who could you be if you were a famous movie star out of any you could pick?" She laughed. Every head turned at each table; their tendrils were out. They were pissing at every fire hydrant on Chimes Street catching her scent. "I guess," she mulled over it. Her smooth intake of Tom Collins swirled about her brain, like cocaine used to do to her. ." . . I guess, Marilyn Monroe?" Juan laughed a feminine screech, the more female than male in his bronzed Portuguese body. "Oh, come on. Merde!" He glanced over at the swooning lead singer of DASH RIPROCK. Could it be true love for the two birds of paradise among the progressive punk masses of disgust and loathing? "Okay. Kim Basinger!" She smiled at him. Her bee-stung lips with bubble gum lipstick smooched and parted, oh so sexy. "But I think I'm better looking." "My little darling! There will always be fabulous women like you who deserve to make deals with Paramount pictures, but you are not in de vicinity." He sipped his drink. "So you shine your luminescence over the ugly people." He was actually serious for once. Then he smiled again after drinking the last of seven Brandy Alexanders. He popped a Mantrax and Darvon combination of pharmaceutical beauty. "But you know what Todd Rungren says" "What does Todd Rungren say?" she looked towards the loudness issued forth from the motley guitarist onstage. He leaned in on her with a grin. "The only beautiful thing is when ugly people Screw." She guffawed. She loved being around him and his little love bird Paul. Paul was an Elton John queen with a sever pout and Barrymore drinking style conducive to the wildest times. Especially when they embarked into the Vieux Carre' the French Quarter. There were just more cretin shaved-heads, skull's-earringed slam dancers. Who only showed up at four in the morning like pathological vampires out of Byron. "Kendra" It was Chuck with that disappointing look on his face, of a man who had everything but still hadn't had enough. "Huh?" "Why do you do that?" "What?" What's the matter?, she looked like. "Make yourself the center of attention? Everybody in this bar is staring at you!" Kendra was miffed. "We talked about this a million times, Chuck. I can't help it." They finally went home way before the sun came up. Before the punkers for Jesus dove into the woodwork from whence they came. The last shaved head and skull jewelry fobs left the establishment, usually without that drunken frat facade. More of a pharmaceutical anti-everything demeanor about them. One girl had a big eel thing T-shirt on. I guess that made it headline news word of mouth all the way, Kendra thought. Cross sections and split eel-things with formaldehyde odors ran through her memory. Her demeanor deteriorated like little soap suds being punctured from the kill juice in the cheap kamikaze's with sour lemon-lime. She and Chuck split off from the other grad students and party. Juan went home aching for Paul, his lover. Chapter Twelve This is his misery, was his misery, would always be his misery. He had fever dreams of that night on the splits caked on the levee, making love to a puking little witch named Karrie Kilshaw and then being chomped to a mutilated torso dragged by his arms, a trail of entrails to follow. It was the ever ongoing fever dream, a horrific night gaunt like a newsreel of terror buzzing through his forehead. What to stop these, resolve this? He had thought something was slithering and whining under his bed? That was ridiculous, but many a night he would look under there to see the double headed monsters leering back at him, in his semicomatose state. They sat at the foot of his bed and sang quartets of stygian lore. The lyre of madness, that way lie death. His heart lurched when he would see the illusions of illustrative gore. Rats nesting and being attacked, chomped down to bloody masses of road-kill. Maybe he was drinking himself into some unclassifiable gate into some inner circle, something out of Dante. his sexual diversion of tossing off to tattered playboys out of date took striations downward spiraling. Many declining ounces of moxie were evident as he swooped below the low door in this exit all the way. It was many eons since he had real actual sex with a girl, cute or otherwise. Not even a big girl could be lured out of a Baton Rouge nightclub, however ugly with a capital U, because he had depression writ all over his face. It was a good thing he dropped out of the fraternity. They remembered him as youthful and rakishly charming. A thin, almost gangly pretty boy. Now he was a pendulous gutted pig's arse. He applauded inwardly this decline. His father was ever vigilant with his mother, Marlene. She was given only a week more to live now. The Dr. Cyclopy Radium ranch with cobalt giving Chemotherapy to the new martyr. Our Lady of the Lake Hospital was to be her last dwelling place. A cloistered, shunted sad room in which to die dingily. He sobbed now, utter gobs of saddened whining away. Tears streaming down, the faucets were wide cracked in his unsubdued angst. He would get suicidal soon, he thought to himself. He went to sleep finally Friday night. The funeral was impeccable, as Marlene would have wished. Her dutiful sons now, the ex-martyr and the newborn apprentice, Ricky Harrison, carrying the torch from the now much more sensible sibling. The two sisters crying heaps, were there, amidst the relatives from both sides of the Harrison family. The sign of dark fleecy skies of steeped caustic waste hung over the horizon. Ricky Harrison had a smell of liquor around his yawp. Carla and Penny Harrison were present with their dutiful spouses and both had come to realize prodigal Ricky Harrison was drunk. Or was that in his mind(?) as the world spun backwards and his efficiency hovel dingy would appear over the slight hump of the horizon and appear. He was crying with sorrowful remorse like the town drunk. The wastrel nothing-boy. Some of Dick Harrison's uncle's were overheard slightly saying cruelly, "What do you expect? He's a drunk. He is going to cry the water works; its a reaction" Marlene was laid out very nicely. Her face was etched in Ricky's painful psyche. She appeared happy, with that expression of a wry grin. God, Ricky thought, I ain't going to make it. "Ricky, I love you . . ," his sister said, and hugged him anyway. All the sorrow and melancholia came to a shadowy nether region. He had to get out here. He had painful moments of hating God in the name of God for killing his mother, his last link to anything or anyone he cared about. It was he who was the first to leave. The relatives, his aunts and uncles whispered, where is he going? Doesn't he have respect for our sister? Dick's wife? His mother? Ricky Harrison went out and into the twilight and the crimson orange fireball fiery flames of scorched earth parted the thick air as he crept through the humidity, to the toyota which barely started. He did only one thing he could think to do. There was the levee where he had done the dirty deed and snaked Karrie Kilshaw. Probably the last person he had sex with besides himself. Years ago, before the paunched wineskin stomach and the death wish, now magnified in the maelstrom. The levee was approaching. He drove through the campus by the roman coliseum tiger stadium. In the empty parking lots, all he could see were parked coffins, with clones and duplicitous cadaver's of Marlene Harrison. He sat near the pristine waters of old man river calling to him. Wagging waves rippled on the banks, right near the spot where he saw that creature that he had told the shrinks about. They didn't believe him and said it didn't matter anyway. Back in the Red room of Rabinhorst Funeral Home, Death smelt like it was supposed to. Marlene was still and silent for once in her life. Dick took it well as the men were talking about the weird rumors. "Marlene had two cancers at once. Breast cancer and lymph node, or was it leukemia?" "She was a fine woman." "Don't know how Dick is going to take it?" "Do you think there is going to be a sickness? That Reverend Jenkins said so, but I think he's just trying to sop up some more pity and scare tactics to roll the bucks in." "We just keep praying. In Lafayette hospitals the cancer ward had to be expanded 400%. Something's really wrong going on. "Those eel things" "Yeah." Some of the men walked away. "Ricky Harrison said he was probably one of the first people to see one. Well, Dick said his sons were all screwed up. But Mark Harrison's about to graduate in Electrical Engineering. He's almost got straight A's. Dean's List, Marlene was saying, a few days before she died. She was so proud." One of the aunts came over. "Marlene looks so good. She looks at peace" "Yes." On the levee, Ricky's thoughts raced around, bouncing off nothing in particular: Do something with your life. The Fotomat ain't exactly a grey suit job, is it? You have a bachelor's degree. Your madre's dead. You are living off your father now. Before, it was madre who was the ambassador of good will. Get a decent job. He would go on more of those Goddamn interviews with vampires, Daddy's old clients. He drove home, and didn't drink one drop there, and stayed up brooding in that ever-present remorse. He was a new man, revived! He would lay off the sauce. He would find that job. Even if it was five dollars an hour. He would take that job. That night he got up after finding he couldn't sleep and poured seven shots of Ten High poison in 7 shot glasses and holding the two liter cola he took them on, kamikazeing them in heroic efforts. So much for laying off the sauce. There were too many things happening. Too many symbolic gestures from on high, from the principalities of hades, from weird sources. What in the hell?, he thought in that single uncomfortable bed with sheets not washed since the turn of the century. The rumpled sheets were the flank side of the levee with mud splits caked around. Things glowed and twin and triple-headed monsters leered and him and sang the rime of the ancient mariner, the ancient french cajun. He saw flying apparitions, cadenced rushes of weirdness flashing, waving. He woke up in a sweat, groggy from the booze, and had some more, because he just remembered his mother was dead. From a cancer like that show said. From the Cancer Alley plague. The disinfecting of the hellishness of all the populist trash's descent into these nether surreal visions of empty roads, empty traveling, empty lives. Chapter Thirteen After he quit Fotomat, he secured employment at Customer Service Electric, a small electrical distributorship. It was in the heart of the ugliest (with a capital U) region of industrialized soot hellishness. Another descent into Pyrahus, and what would be the reason this time? Five little bucks an hour's wage for running around the insides of corrugated dank warehouse of shrieking black men stoned out of their gourds, one and all. His father had obtained for Ricky Harrison an interview for a position as an insides sales person, but the moment Harrison entered the room, his interviewer gleaned that the boy was in bad straights. The blue eyed boy for a while, he took the lowly position of a warehouse gopher to the multitudes of monolithic refineries all up and down the Mississippi. His boss was Pokey Tuminello, an Italian who knew the ropes in and out of the business, who dressed casually and stood steadfast amongst the several men in the warehouse. Ricky choked on the carbon exhausts and soot from the two forklifts spinning around the concrete indoor building. It was a descent from the Valley of ashes into an interior of an inner circle. The direction of Divineness was down, inside, ulterior, unseen. The further down one went, the closer to solving the perplexing state of grace of the lack of it. Here in Baton Rouge, off Choctaw drive. The wasteland of the city fomented with outcrops of little bolt and die shops, auto parts places. Little supply companies were like pilot fish sucking unto the lower lip of a shark. He first noted the old black man. Short, firmly planted stance, swaggering shuffle, nice smile, with the difficulty of speech from the lack of teeth, wearing ill-fitting false teeth. He shook Ricky's soft, womanly, sensitive hand. Ricky could feel the man's soul through calluses and leathery hands that never knew leisure. For a fleeting minute Ricky thought about Cornbread, the second coming. But Wilbert was amusing. Ingratiating and happy soul he was. The blacks just kind of observed the new boy, working man, Harrison. They were very busy in their running around the sunken palace. Grabbing bizarre electrical fixtures, wiring, all sorts of alien contraptions used somewhere out here. Outside, where one could see, in some caustic refinery. Ricky could not register the individual collective of brown men's faces, as they peered back from the various aisles of tins, boxes, numbers and parts. There was some order to the chaos of the shed of tin. Forklifts were driven by maniacs with licenses to main and would with rubbery moon vehicles following the paths to loading docks. The door wide open now, the sunny air was inhaled by all. The tall men of brown filed in. Drivers hauled their flatbed railed vehicles, sputtering their diesel engines brutally. Trucks backed ass-end into the stygian warehouse. The rustling about of men, hauling together like they were fit for the rig, so they fit in the rig. The day waned now. It was an estimable confusion to the new guy, Harrison. A displaced frat boy, white bread from the manicured suburbs, finding himself amidst these tough men. It was a matter of feeling comfortable there. They would get used to him soon enough. For the first few weeks, Rick wouldn't say anything outrageous, as was wont by his alcoholic sensibilities. Pokey introduced him to all the men standing about. "This is our new warehouse man, Ricky Harrison." the large mouthed italian said with some aplomb. They shook his hand. He was in now. Paid every two weeks; that eagle flew two Fridays of the Mayan sun. He hastily exited the building daily, going through the executive offices. The inside salesmen all wrapping up their hustling numbers and phone pitches, and calling it a determined end of day. He attempted to smile as he could sense that indescribable security from the half-empty bottle of the hovel. When he opened the door on that second floor and entered the safety from the projects across the way, down there, he knew he wanted to line up those shot glasses pretty all in a row. And fill them up without spilling not one molecule's worth on the slimy formica of an orange haze sheen. He looked about the place; in the shag carpet of inferior brusqueness lay husks of small cockroaches on the battlefield. The toilet was a moon pool of golden fluid, unflushed thickly urine. Not a good sign of moral fitness. Empty bottles stood like coffins in their death stances near the door. The stereo from the era of the vanished seventies, a Marantz receiver stood with a stack of classical albums. They were concertos and mainly requiems. Ricky Harrison, part-time martyr for lost causes and lost brothers, was into requiems, which were Sacred Masses for the Dead. So he played them, to wallow in the languid lachrymose of vaporous silent seas. Creaking of chairs, two headed calves born in his thoughts, the spilling of salt, the etchings of an alcoholic. The everyman for an undefined and now neither generation that didn't necessarily have a war to hang it's coat on, tailing onto the sixties radicalism. The bottle remained steady as he poured the liquid of thickly oil can weight. The dirty shot glasses all neat in a row were now poured neat, and the two-liter cola exploded into his mouth with carbonation. And then each shot dumped down the mouth and swished around. he had contracted liquor as a medication of sorts. He was in superior decline, and the descent was mutual; the state was falling into ruin about him. It was a scene of toppling Aeonian arches in a fiery maelstrom. But for now it was surceased. He put on a movie carefully selected from the arduously straight video library. Stacks and stacks of celluloid plastic (that was one product from chlorine spills and glycol deaths) were his pyre of life. He had no excuse to drink. But yes, he did; the Faure requiem was played full bang from the funeral parlor into the air. Breezing along the interstate, and into his wafting room. The hour of lingering death, his mother laid out real pretty, like his shot glasses. He was embalming himself. He didn't know or think about AA. He denied reality beyond the four walls he was bound within, unflushed toilet and all. He finally got hungry enough to rustle up some crudburgers to throw down his maw. He went to bed knowing the night gaunts would appear again, like a malevolent stranger, a phantom of ambivalence. The fine line between both; him alive and his Marlene Harrison, fine mother, now buried beneath the dirt in the manicured cemetery near the neighborhood, right across the street from the Broadmoor Shopping center where one couldn't beat those double coupons. he tried to nod off in his resentment of drinking himself sober. He was committed to throttling his genitals in amazingly dreariness. The mutilation of his soul as he tossed off to terribly ripped up playboy magazines courting him. The eyes of the playmates beckoning him to issue forth and in a sense vanquish another stemming tide, libido. But soon that would go too. Everything seemed to in entropy here in the ugly city, a rather large version of Devil's swamp landfill over there near EXXON. So he would have a work ethic in proportion to his wayward drinking, something akin to St. Augustine. The precipice was not as precarious as thought before. He would garner his sum and slay the beasts of this mind set. His mother copped up in his dreams again. He couldn't even think about masturbating in his pathetic drunken way. Would he ever get a girlfriend again? It was like he had lost the way. He was too bloated and too pathetic and all he wanted was a little pity. He got plenty in his paranoid sheen or outlook. The next day he managed to get up without necessarily feeling queasy, and managed to fill the tureen in the bathroom. He took a shower and the car started and he blasted down Lobdell Avenue through the uneventful trek to Customer service electric supply company. "How ya doing' this morning?" Pokey asked kindly. "Good," he said. "You're gonna follow some of the guys as they fill the orders. Start gettin' a feel of where everything is . Over there is plastibond pipe. Over here is the electronic stuff. Light bulbs upstairs." "Okay." "Okay, Rayhound. Take Ricky around and fill these orders." Rayhound was a scrappy black dude, dark in tone and lean and a hustler. Why they called him Rayhound was the mystery left unknown for the nonce. "You see, we got here the Techtronic line. Over here (as they walked the corridors of myriads of little doo dads and striated little objects) we got --screw--what is that called? Oh, yeah. They got your plastibond pipe here" He lit a cigarette and it hung down his rather strong face. "You got a college degree?" he asked seriously. "Yeah." "Damn. And you couldn't get a better job?" "No. Believe me, I tried." Ricky Harrison was the silent boy for a good while during the day. After a few orders were pulled, Ricky was introduced to the wild man himself, Joe Taylor. They shook white man style. "Yeah, I played basketball for McNeese. Lake Charles." "I thought I read about you in some of the sports pages." Harrison sincerely thought. "I got a few clippings." "What's that?" Harrison asked. A truck came up the parking lot and stopped, a sandwich truck. "That's the roach coach." "They sell hot sausage poboys, orange juice, egg sandwiches. But it's all poisoned." Harrison smiled. He liked Joe Taylor, basketball star, hip hop contender. The whole company filed out to get the ichorous vending sandwiches under heated plates. The girl stood there collecting the money from the masses. "Look here, you got 'cha a sandwich here made in 1954. And looka here. . ." "Look here, Belinda," he said, holding up a boiled egg. "If I can bust open this egg without using two hands, you'll give it to me for free, right?" "No Joe, just pay for the egg or put it back" she said, smiling again. "Okay, it's a deal. I'm gonna break it" "Put it back, Joe." Joe put it in his right hand, those marvelous basketball hands that had put many a basketball through a net for the glory of Louisiana colleges. He squeezed like he was using all his strength. Ricky could tell he was just exaggerating. Harrison was quite amused. They exited. The day went a lot shorter than that first day. The insides of the tin-roofed warehouse were filled with interesting men. First, the insides sales boys were nice. They were on the phone all day long. There was a contingent quarter for the black men. Bobby Magee was a Christian born-again, who had told Ricky Harrison upon shaking his hand: "Man! You got hands like a woman" and he laughed. He was truly a nice guy. He blew the curve off even bleeding heart liberals like Ricky. He could have been of divine origin like Cornbread. Same lineage, ennobled Christianity and indentured to Almighty God. Joe Taylor was a maniacal man. Married, he talked about being in basketball camp with some LA Lakers. A lie. And playing basketball in Australian. Another lie, but he was hilarious in his jockeying roughhouse of the games. The dozens. "What are the dozens?" Harrison asked Joe. They walked by the docks where trucks backed up by black drivers who knew the black guys that we had, thought Ricky. There was some secret society of fellowship among these guys. A whole other world. "The brother's play the dozens." Joe said, matter-of-factly. He fooled with some packing slips. "Like what?" "Like messing around with each odder." "Like what?" "Like giving each other a hard time. We give Rayhound a hard time because he's so strung out, tense." "Like stuff like 'Your mamma'?" "No. We don't play that." "That's what the white boys got from y'all." "WE don't talk about each other's mamas." He went into a speech with a five point program detailing how the brothers played the dozens. Ricky laughed hysterically. "You know, crazy white boy? When you first walked in here, you looked about seven feet tall. I swear, when I first saw you, you must have been wearing elevator shoes" He laughed. "I was just standing up straight. I'm normally a hunchback." "You crazy." "See ya later, little man." Ricky smiled and walked away. "That's my boy. Jethro over there," Joe pointing to Ricky, the white breaded fraternity punk. He filled a few orders on his own and thought reverently about booze hitting inside his innards, relaxing him. That instant feeling of reverie. He hadn't even thought about his madre, Marlene, now not of this earth, on another plane of existence. But he didn't believe that. But he believed in chasing the snakes out of Ireland, with a walking stick, St. Patrick. Well, he could be the St. Patrick of Baton Rouge. Home of the dirtiest water this side of toxic waste dumps and salt domes in subterranean caverns. Make the water calm in the midst of turmoil. The turmoil inside where it hurt. Where the bourbon would medicate his psyche. Chapter Fourteen He went home and set up the shot glasses again. But he managed to watch a halfway decent movie on television and called his sisters and said hello. Told them the lies about his situation, what they wanted to hear. That he was happy, that he was employed, that he had a paying salary. That he wasn't drinking, he said, while the bottle was sitting there beckoning him during commercial breaks. "Don't talk anymore about cancer or eels. Okay Ricky?" his older sister said very carefully. "We think that you are the most upset about mamma's death." Ricky gulped the bourbon and it almost went down the wrong pipe in his near-weeping stance. He didn't say anything but a tear formed like a globule and fell down his sensitive blonde countenance. His mouth was all rubbery now into a wagging low frown like he was ready to burst in his bleary melancholic state. He managed to say something, barely. Sobbing, "I loved her . . ," and then he exploded into remorse. His sister was crying too, now. "We all miss her." "Ricky," she managed to say, "we all love you." He continued to sob, unable to get anything coherent. It was like Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, heart of the melancholic just streaming invisibly through him. He hurriedly got dressed for work in the jeans of late standing in the corner by themselves, and puttered around and hauled his ass to work. The usual hallo's. Now he was taken in by the boys and Pokey, the modern mafioso. Ricky savored the cup of coffee with the boys. Most were loading the flatbeds. Those metal fence pieces stuck back on the flatbed gave the illusion of holding all the pipe and wiring and orders all brown bagged like Uncle Earl's free lunches thirty years ago. Elward was as always talking that White Castle-Plaquemine coonass slang. He had possibly the world's ugliest mustache ever seen upon the embrasure of a black man. Elward wasn't exactly black; he was closer to orange. But he was quite a guy. He had been one of the first to greet and introduce himself to Ricky Harrison, new meat. As usual, Joe Taylor was messing around with Rayhound. He was also trying to borrow money from Mike Green, a black guy who walked like John Wayne. He was Joe's best friend; when they had gone to MacNeese together, Joe told Ricky that "I even wore his underwear, when I ran out of nothing to wear." That was quite an accolade to the dwellers of industrial paradise. The men nearer to God inside that subterranean warehouse than all the clergy at the Catholic spire cathedrals put together. Rayhound casually said: "Man do like to get high?" in such a nonchalant way. A refinement of his dark featured squarish skinny countenance. "Well, uh. . .I used to," Ricky Said, "I just like to drink. A lot." "What you like to drank?" Rayhound said. "Lots of cheap bourbon." "Man, I tell you what, last time I had a lot of Vodka, I was screwed up the next day" He laughed with tremendous jocularity, "kaa ha hhhaah." Like the dozens had barraged him for many years. Once more the suburban college boy thing surfaced, but Ricky sensed that they were all one. In these few weeks of getting acquainted with the boys nearer to God in the nest egg of La Machine Infernal. Amidst the refineries like the tower of Babel. The Magic Kingdom. Spires of monstrous circus apparatus hung above them like a martian city. Joe Taylor told fledgling black wannabe Ricky Harrison, the blue-eyed boy from the manicured suburbs and the death pyre of the flaming carcass of his madre Marlene, that he would make it through the denial and memory and pain of his mamma. "Man, you start feeling better when you make your mind up too." Joe cared. They all cared. They all seemed to accept Ricky Harrison for his quotations of Eliot and Lowry. And the other famous poets and writers, for Harrison himself had risen like a Phoenix out of the ashes of college fraternity death row to become the writer/poet in residence of Customer Service Electric Supply. The boys didn't mind when he said, "I want to quote Lord Byron to y'all sometime in the grey mist of this place." Joe would then say, his stolid nature, suave so much that the pretty white girls loved him" Yeah Harrison, Someday Jethro, I gotta have a long talk with that boy. . ." Then peals of laughter rang through the hollow place. That first paycheck came. He had 400.00 fins before taxes at 5.00 an hour. Even though his college frat brothers were making five times that. "When it's wintertime you'll be freezing your ass off in that warehouse. You'll be standing by the trucks to keep from freezing" Rayhound would say. Bar-hopping was mentioned once in a while"You ever been to Smackwater Jacks?" Mike Green asked him. The behemoth was funny. The guy was from Iberville Parish, he had some white blood in him so he was creole. Handsome also. "Man that church lunch cooking from what sis name's church got me sick." "Why?" Harrison asked. "Cause there wasn't no seasoning. It was so bland." One literally had to have a cast iron stomach to eat the Jambalaya from Gonzales, the Oysters in Horseradish sauce from Amite, the Gumbo from anywhere in the state. It was a peasant dish with shrimp, turkey, chicken, onions, oysters, fish, everything. It was way before Popeye's fried chicken put a franchise on the heritage of the state. People liked their dirty rice, hot. They liked their deer sausage hot. They liked their hash browns hot. Ricky thought that this sportsman's paradise had equated to a sideshow carnival, laden with Snakeman, Lizard Man, the two-headed boy in the circus. The thing in a jar that was the nephew of a redneck woman in Denham springs, where bumper stickers read "Hitler would have loved abortions." Now the carnival atmosphere had escalated in the most mysterious way. Reports of nuclear leaks like a ship being plugged and bilged. Chemical plants buying off the state environmental midgets, dumping sludge into the mighty Mississippi. The blood that soaked the ground was taking root. The forlorn cavernous salt domes had subterranean promises yet unkept. Things came to the surface. Edward had that catfish mustache befitting a creole black man who lived on the river road. On the lower bed of the big river, down by White Castle, well below Plaquemine. Down where one would see antebellum homes and plantations now as historic landmarks. He used to see lots of stuff, he said to Ricky. "I went down by Ceiba Geigy. That thing ain't nothing but a big garbage can. I put my respirator on before I even get close to there" he said with that Gross Tete, Whiskey Bay eloquence of enunciating and fervor when he spoke. Ricky had a cocked ear. "I done heard about them EEL things (almost like a preacher). I don't even like going near that nuclear reactor these days. Got DAMN!" Ricky wanted to tell him about the night he screwed Karrie and saw the gargoyle of mystic origin. "Nuclear mixed with Chemicals and Chlorine and Glycol ain't NO GOODDD!" Edward said. They were all lagging round at the end of the day. "I heard some field hands down on the nuclear farm . . ," That was too much for Joe Taylor. He gagged, laughing. "What chu laughin at?," Edward said, looking Joe Taylor hunched over, exaggerated. "Black man. . ." Rayhound said, "Watch out - -here it comes" "ah hah . . . "Screw-em if they can't take a joke." Joe Taylor nodded. "The nu--clear" he said clearly . . . "plant, said they had a bunch o' people with radiation sickness and left the company." "Crud, the whole town's got cancer" Ricky stood there uncertain but interested, keenly so. "What I really heard . . ," Edward said, his eyes looking bugged out now at Joe Taylor . . . "Was they had some men who got caught near them radiation silo looking thangs . . . and they half dead and half alive, like" "Like what?" "Like screwin zombie's!" "Sheeit." "I ain't kidding." Edward looked around quite animated. "Monster men. Men breeding with eel-things. Men eating eel-things." "Eel-things," that struck a chord with Harrison. "Crud, I don't know. Snakes, two heads. They found those under the docks at Exxon. Crud I go there every screwin' (he hushed when he said that word) day!" It was time to go home. 5:00 o'clock. Time to check in with the K&B Drugstore lady who stood in front of the finest bourbon stock in the parish. Many a five dollars and 35 cents were spent on the swill that made the wheels greased and the tongue babble. Chapters 15 thru 18 will be up on April 1st. Visit M.F. Korn's web site, March 1999 HofP |