It’s Happening—The Rot Has Set In
Art like you’ve never seen it! Light switch by an electrician and photo by the author
There’s slow windup to this piece like summer baseball. Trigger warning for real baseball fans and anyone who likes to eat.
I hung out with a guy in Carolina who took more nourishment from vending machines than any boy should if he expected to make it out of his teens, let alone gain retirement age. Harry’s food group of choice was Lays potato chips with a Coke. Driving to Columbia to visit my girlfriend, which we did every couple weeks, he explained his theory was eventually there’d be nothing else to eat, that the end of the country if not the universe was at hand, and I needed to get used to it. He’d been reading some science fiction stuff.
One time I drove it by myself in the middle of a blizzard, and I was doing so-so until I got stuck after the car in front chickened out on G-D uphill, and was released from walking miles back to my dorm in Clemson by two dudes in a pickup who gave me a push start to get around and on down the road.
So I stopped in Pendleton down a ways and asked whether they had chains for a VW, which indeed they did, so I had them babies slapped on, drove maybe another twenty miles down the road thinking this was really dumb, and turned around. South Carolina, even in the Blue Ridge, doesn’t get blizzards too often, but swear to the gods who love us, they were plowing the highway with road graders.
It was two+ hours from Clemson to Columbia in my ’67 VW Bug, or more like three hours if we drove Harry’s even older one you had to speed up on the downhill to make it up the next, so we had time to explore the concept of food groups, and I engaged him, stretching it a piece, saying we’d all be driving Interstates between Esso stations, and the whole of the country would be one smooth piece of blacktop, no homes, no businesses, only acres of asphalt and Esso stations spread shore to shining shore. It would have been a fine irony for the Apocalypse we both were expecting. Shit, anyone with a brain was expecting.
Now looking back, we haven’t gotten quite that far, but not for lack of trying.
Harry came from a family of eccentrics, so I heard. His father was a grand poohbah in South Carolina politics, and slayed Smaug the dragon, but I could be wrong about that latter bit. I do know Harry had inherited his grandmother’s complete collection of Ambrose Bierce’s writings, or it might have been H. L. Mencken—I get them confused, but I do recall it was an original edition collection and I was jealous.
In his day, Mencken was known as the ‘Sage of Baltimore’ and that was something to be proud of, but the more I consider it, the collection was definitely by Bierce, best known today if at all for his The Devil’s Dictionary, god bless. His writing made Twain’s read like pure scripture. He was Mick Jagger to John Lennon to place it in more current context.
The first The Devil's Dictionary column by Ambrose Bierce, from The Wasp, 5 March 1881
Harry also thought the Grateful Dead were the best rock band going, though he accepted The Band was great as well. So he leapt at going with us (skeptical wife and I) to the Watkins Glen race track up yonder in the Finger Lakes to see both bands, and my blues heroes, the Allman Brothers, sadly sans Duane. Duane had shortly wrapped his motorcycle around a tree, so there’d be no more standing at the foot of the stage watching him light a cigarette, place it just so between the tuning keys and forget it while he went off on another amazing tear. Duane was a serious redneck who could play the blues like no one else back then.
Though we were there in Watkins Glen with no glen in sight and 600,000+ of our favorite stoners in the rain. Seems no one knew that in the summer, when the sun went down and the wind came up, it got down in the digits in the Finger Lakes. Up the hill behind the bandstand was a decent size copse to get us out of the mosh pit in front so that’s where we headed before the thunderstorms arrived.
My wife wouldn’t speak to me for constructing a lean-to for the three of us instead of her wearing it poncho-style in the downpour that commenced. I explained that a lean-to is half a tent, or one poncho US Army style. Further employing my scouting skills, I set to scrounge dry wood, borrowed a brand from a troop nearby and got a fire going. Spying a waif of a shivering hippie in halter top and shorts, I thought to say she should join the three of us by the fire but knew for certain that would be going too far, being wise to the ways of girlfriends and wives like I was. [1]
[1] Halters is for keeping them babies in line, not that I would know.
That was one cold ass night in the Finger Lakes, that I do know.
To my complete surprise, my girlfriend not so longer became the mother of my children.
I’d had a previous girlfriend who went all Sweetbrier on me with waist-length light brown hair and Twiggy sized—and was crazy as a loon. Part of learning about girlfriends is having a crazy one you can’t shake. She teaches you stuff.
Harry was sure no woman would love him, being diminutive of build, though he made up for it with a wicked sense of humor. One woman he plighted perpetual love to was Barbara, and she was cute enough, but was either too coy or too kind, and this continued for several years, with letters and phone calls and stuff. I don’t know if there was a connection between his love of potato chips and his failure to sleep with her but may need to come up with something before the end of this story.
This week D and I are on our fabulous vacation, renting a place in Sanderling on the Outer Banks, and from one side to the other of this place, it appears Harry could be more right than I in terms of the Apocalypse or at least a serious decline in American tastes.
A few decades back, the cottages you found on the Outer Banks were built by serious framing carpenters who knew their craft—you either learned it, or replaced it after the next hurricane. These were local boys with drawls and tobacco employing man-sized timbers and real cedar shakes. Somewhere beginning in the 80s, the sizes of homes began to more resemble overweight grand dames wearing furs and jewels—not meant as a slur, mind. And year by year, more pastel pastries and fewer authentic island homes were being furiously raised ahead of the final hurricane that will scour this entire stretch of sand. I read that in the Bible—or The Devil’s Dictionary.
It doesn’t seem there’s a lack of wood in Carolina so much as a lack of expectations.
Remember, it’s the Boomers now with the money, and they’ve never been known for sophisticated taste when it comes to much. Developers want to get in and get out, and who’s going to tell the difference between Styrofoam and wood if it’s glued to the ceiling way up there?
This place looked decent in the pictures if a bit too foo-foo. Up close, it looks as though it received a recent ‘upgrade’ with new fiberglass windows, siding, floors, and walls, the works. Whoever came up with the color scheme knew their Coastal Living magazine, cool and breezy being the theme throughout.
The luxury vinyl flooring (to distinguish it from your grandmother’s yellow kitchen floor) is made to look like wide wood planks from back in the day, but the color’s too pale. I think they were going for that bleached wood look, though who’d bleach a floor? Otherwise, it is an improvement over the 80s shag carpets nobody ever shampooed. And at first blush, the bluish tinged wall panels could be mistaken for T-11 plywood, complete with fake patched knots, the giveaway being you can see no joints, only indents where real joints might have been.
I spotted one small area where the original board-and-bead wainscot was still in place. What do these people have against actual wood? North Carolina has been producing timber since Colonial times, and they’re going for plastic now?
The ‘Roman’ shades have no way to raise or lower, except for teeny buttons that don’t work well, so you just shove them up. The living room couch and chairs are faux white leather—I know because cowhide isn’t white—and the gas log fireplace surround is about 1/8” thick plastic, with little indents between the tile patterns. The surround has pretend half-inch by two-inch ceramic tiles you see in all the developers’ kitchens nowdays.
Ah, but the bulldog stretched on the hearth, who could be a suckling pig ready for feasting minus the apricot, except the gas fire is but decoration, and no respectable dog—not even an English bulldog—would be roasting hisself inches from the fake flames—providing they and he were real. Breeders have made the English bulldog into a caricature of himself. But I swear, from the rear view this one’s an overweight piglet.
The living room has two side tables with lights either end of the room with fake tree rings for tabletops and a cluster of branches at random diagonals supporting the tree rings made to look like folks with no cash and bad taste in furniture who had painted them white then affixed them to the composite tree rings, all recreated in inorganics.
In the corner, there’s a white wood-like vertical frame thingy meant to hold a stereo hidden behind open slats, but now only has the blinky router sitting on the middle shelf and an Alexis-type oblong object to listen in on your inner most desires, topped with a lamp made to look like brown coral that for some reason—presumably there’s a reason—has a clear acrylic base stacked atop an additional bronze looking base; the lamp has pride of place in the stack. Must have been wonderful drugs.
Small inartful illustration art is hung here and there, all of it prints, though there is one ‘original’ in a bedroom resembling someone cleaning their paintbrush on the canvas pretending Picasso was in the room.
The one I especially like is the reddish lobster in a frontal pose, looking like the preacher who just delivered his best Christmas sermon ever, pinchers proud in front of him, like he’s saying, “come to me, my little children and sin no more.” Below him is a fat fish in profile, like the photos they take in prisons just after you’ve been arraigned. And the array of sardine fish, all the same best I can tell pointed in the same direction, but the illustrator pointed them slightly downward, with subtle angles to each other to give it that photorealistic apperance.
Two disturbing artifacts that look like twins of Einstein’s brains, each in its own glass container, are sitting on the table just behind the white faux leather couch. On closer inspection, they are in fact globes of glued seashells meant to look like—I have no idea—what’s the name of that fish that rolls balls of shit on the bottom of the ocean until they’re big and round? Like that, maybe.
I’ll sleep better if I knew the interior desecrators had left the islands a long time ago.
decorations by unknown crazy girlfriend—photo by the author
Did I mention the structural foam core beams painted in pale gray so as not to offend with too much drama that are coped to the light valances either end of the room? Are they fake valences, or are the valances fake roof beams? Dunno.
The fireplace mantle is painted white—because of that article in Coastal Living—with a distressed wood mantle board so you know it’s authentic simple folk art. Thank god, the fireplace is fake or we’d be watching the TV right melting like the witch with Auntie M going nuts and her old lady wig blowing off so they need to retake the scene.
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The plumbers installed the water heater on the ground floor because all they had to do was back up the van, but the kitchen is two floors up—how long would you suppose the hot water heater takes to deliver warm? And they forgot to put a potty room on the main level as well. You need to trot downstairs after the six pack’s finished.
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There’s a wee tiny Calphalon pot—really just a potlet—you can use for warming milk, and a slightly larger unlabeled pot with an almost matching lid from an All-Clad pot, and after that, you’re on your own. The owner’s cast-off cookware in Sanderling is a step above what you’ll find in Kill Devil, but only two pots? I suppose they expect people don’t come for the home cooking they could do, except during the slack season when the restaurant cooks skip town for Key West for better dope, and you really have to make due.
I remember the three-room cottage on South Bimini that had better implements to pound out conch than to cook a real meal—with Army surplus aluminum pots dating from WWII, a pair of paring knifes and some plasticware. We got our drinking water on North Bimini, returning with the ten gallon water container on the ferry, greatly protected by the tin foil top. Fortunately, the mayor of Alexandria, whose house it was, kept an unlocked whiskey cabinet. I seriously doubt he ever engaged in a conversation with Mathew (pronounced Mattu) Man, the lean, shifty-looking ferry boat captain who I felt sure could have delivered pot, working women and whatever upon request, just what a dude needed after a hard day fishing off the reefs. Gary Hart may have known Mattu Man.
Flying into Bimini, the pilot pointed out the recent pot-running plane that had ditched in the trees short of the landing strip. Pot as in hootch, not All-Clad.
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Back to the brain casings in glass jars behind the poofy white sofa: as you stare at the black pig-dog lying afore the afore mentioned fake fire beneath the TV that’s presently showing the former Redskins getting a serious smack down by Dallas, the brains are but a foot at most behind your head. Has a brain casing ever attacked you watching TV? How much whiskey before it did? Yours not theirs, or perhaps both, since you never know about brains in glass houses after too much vacation whiskey—see your own brain cells vacate—better than watching little Danny’s former redskins get their brains stove in.
I’ve read tales that little Danny enjoys videos of his cheerleaders changing in their dressing rooms, bouncing their boobies without halter tops, but I feel certain it’s just a Wapo rumor. And if he did, would Goodell let him play with all those other spiritually inclined NFL owners?
Redskins—what’s so bad? At first, I couldn’t get why folks would take offense at the term. Then it occurred to me, maybe it was just the last straw. First their good hunting land was stolen, then some more until all they had left was desert, but the colonials kept the names because the only names they think of were New England, New Haven, West Haven, South Haven, No Haven, and enough Charlestons to shake a stick at, and they couldn’t draw a map to save themselves from running aground, so they kept the natives’ names of rivers and such—and then named their gambling teams after them. That’s a theory.
It must be hard to maintain a sense of humor after all the real natives been through. I say blame it on the Europeans. We’d have never thought of all that shit on our own. Besides, Lays potato chips ain’t so bad.
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With apologies to Padgett Powell who writes these kinds of tales way better than I could. Powell’s Indigo is what I’m blowing through today. Or maybe I was channeling Kurt Vonnegut.