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OBS! Denna textfil ingår i ett arkiv som är dedikerat att bevara svensk undergroundkultur, med målsättningen att vara så heltäckande som möjligt. Flashback kan inte garantera att innehållet är korrekt, användbart eller baserat på fakta, och är inte heller ansvariga för eventuella skador som uppstår från användning av informationen.
### ### ### ### ### #### ### ### ### #### ### ### ##### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ##### ### ### ########## ### ### ########## ### ### ### ### Underground eXperts United Presents... ####### ## ## ####### # # ####### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## #### ## ## #### # # ####### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ####### ####### # # ####### ####### ####### [ At A Trailer In The Woods ] [ By Eric Chaet ] ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ AT A TRAILER IN THE WOODS by Eric Chaet "I was with my father when he died. It was weird," Gust Helsing said, as he carried a portable gas heater out to the small trailer, where he set me up, about 50 feet from his house in the clearing in the woods. He connected the heater to a pipe, turned a valve - bending over to do it - and lit the blue pilot light. I was acutely aware that, without his doing so, I would freeze that night. Gust and his wife - he'd married since he'd been my most enthusiastic student - and their 2 wide-eyed young sons, and Ruth, a teenage daughter from a boyhood fling in Minneapolis - lived in the frame house on the property Gust's father bought the last few years of his life, then left to Gust, I now learned. "I was cleaning a chimney in Manitou - nobody knew where I was," Gust said. "My brother drove by. I knew my father was sick - but that's all. I went right away. I sat down by the bed. I FELT HIM PASS THRU ME. I said, 'He's gone.' Then the line on the screen went flat, and there was a sickening, like, dial-tone. "He was on his own since he was 13. He worked on a farm 14 hours a day. He didn't just do one thing, like people do now. He had all sorts of responsibilities. And he never had to spend any of his money. He said he always had a dollar in his pocket. That would be like 100 dollars now. "The only time I didn't get along with him was when he started drinking too much. After he bought the land, with the house on it, he used to come here to be away from the family, and to drink. "I came after him. "'Don't get mad at me, Gust,' he said. 'I've had enough of this life. I'd put a bullet thru my head - but I wasn't raised that way. I keep remembering: be a man, have a drink.' "He was in the infantry, in the Philippines, during World War II. He said he was 24, the oldest. They kept sending young lieutenants from West Point. "'You're going in there!' they'd say, pointing into the mouths of caves. But he knew what was IN there. "'Oh, no, we're not,' he'd say. "When he came home, he got a job exterminating wolves. Then he got the job with the police force." WHEN I TAUGHT at Frozen Fish Community College, Gust signed up for one of my classes after another, and sat in on some he wasn't signed up for - and absorbed the ideas, which were a revelation to him - with great delight, but very selectively. Tho I corrected him many times, he continued to write sentences contemptuous of grammar and spelling. But he cheerfully read William James' PRAGMATISM and Buckminster Fuller - "Do more with less" - and Plato's REPUBLIC and the BHAGAVAD-GITA - and understood, and remembered, and USED - what he had read. Tall and lanky, he had run several miles a day, on all but the coldest days - and nights! - of winter. And he had greater skill than anyone I had ever met, at hatha yoga, once he learned that there was such a thing - so that he was limber as well as strong from a childhood of lifting and moving soil, ice, snow, wood, water, potatoes, steel tools, and machine parts. I was living on the older, shabbier side of Manitou - East-Town - near the old iron-ore docks. I used to run along the shore, where the rusting old loading apparatus was set up, and up and down the sand dunes. But I couldn't keep up with Gust. He ran too far and fast for me. He would frequently run the ten miles home from Manitou. He was red-headed, blue-eyed, freckled. On becoming a chimney sweep, he switched from flannel shirts, jeans, and chook - to black top-hat and worn but well-mended tuxedo with tails. He would run in that outfit. Tho he was more often to be seen behind the wheel of the shining red pick-up, with no sign of rust - unusual in those parts, where the roads are heavily salted - except for late-model cars lawyers, doctors, and pulp-mill executives drove - with HELSING CHIMNEY-SWEEPING 421-3687, in crisp white letters, on the sides - or straddling peaks of roofs of houses, poking his long-handled brush down the chimney. Gust started his business shortly before his father died. I had quit teaching, and was holed up in a 100-year-old rented house - my tiny landlady Mrs. DuHamel's, and her deceased husband's, home for 50 years. She now lived next door with a son and granddaughter, and, at a table covered with cups, plates, and papers, over coffee and newspaper, in the dark kitchen, wheezed, "God save North America!" years before I'd heard of ecology. I think she was reacted, morally, to the political and cultural news, tho. I paid only $85 a month rent. The winter wind blew right thru the house - and thru me! But I was able to save almost all my salary, and, after just 2 years of teaching - following 5 years of homeless drifting, alternating with odd jobs and hospitality of a month or 2 in someone's den or garage - was able to get back to my main work, which was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a guitar, pencil, and paper - writing songs with seriously useful ideas - at least in my estimation - but in the rhythms and styles of the songs played day after day, year after year, on thousands of rock and country radio stations across the USA - and, like them, 3 minutes long. Gust had used all HIS money - he'd been a machinist of recognized excellence for years before and during the time he was my student - equipping himself with a vacuum, hoses, set of ladders, brushes, hooks, the good used truck, and the top-hat and tails. But he had no customers. He came to me in a panic, on the verge of tears. I don't say this derisively. He'd done something bold to improve his position - something everyone would admit was a sensible, good risk, IF IT SUCCEEDED - and he wasn't able to control everything, and things weren't working out for him, at least not fast enough. He was honestly afraid. I get like that, a lot. What - should you never take a risk? And if you take a risk, mightn't it fail? And if no risk is taken, won't that which is unsatisfactory continue to prevail? Don't we benefit, every day, from the results of such risks taken in the past? We sat on the floor of the biggest room of my house. There was no rug or furniture. I had duct-taped a many-colored patchwork of 25 cent carpet patches - the store on Main Street where I found them called them "remnants" - to the windows, to keep out some of the cold. Unfortunately, they kept out the sun-light as well. He asked, What could he do to get customers? I asked him how much money he had left. He said, "Twenty dollars." I said, "Give me ten," and went to the WROX-radio studio, played a simple guitar progression - C, F, G7 - 4/4 finger-roll - and sang: Fire is real, winter is cold - Creosote builds in your chimney hole! Brush it yourself, or call Gust Helsing - Vacuum-equipped, for thorough cleaning! Then I leaned into the microphone, and said, softly, "Call 421-3687." The advertising director at WROX was Cheryl L'Emissaire - an energetic, shapely young woman, with long lustrous black hair, who made sure - lifting her eye-brows - that I noticed the engaging sparkle in her green eyes - and that there was no ring sparkling on her finger, which she pulled and wiggled and glanced at significantly - all the while checking to be sure I noticed. She wasn't the only beautiful or otherwise interesting woman of the non-traditional, ready-to-go-to-it sort to make me aware of her candidacy - after my years of living without a place to take anyone to - but what was I going to do with whichever of them I stopped resisting, if - as seemed very likely - the money ran out again? I was getting nothing but BETTER LUCK ON ANOTHER PLANET letters - they weren't quite that blunt - from the record companies on both coasts, that I'd sent cassettes and sheet music to. Cheryl loved the ad, she said, yearning into my eyes - hers green, clear, excited, arms limp at her side - vulnerable. Not only did the 30 second ad run 10 times a day for a week, but she kept the disk-jockies talking about Gust all the time. And, of course, Gust - a strikingly handsome young man anyway - was seen all around Manitou in his outlandish top-hat and tails, and driving his bright red truck. He never lacked for customers after that. Then his father died, and left him the land and the house. THERE FOLLOWED ABOUT 10 YEARS, of what other people considered ups (that is, "good jobs" they were shocked when I walked away from) and downs (my work was rejected, and my resume didn't qualify me to contribute and thrive, otherwise). GUST SAID HIS WIFE, Jolene - a serious, short-haired blond woman, with black-framed glasses - was studying computers. "I'm willing to support her," he told me, "for the time being." He, F.G. Graske, and I were sharing Graske's schnapps, the evening I hiked in - over a little table built into the end of the trailer, opposite the bunks. The little gas heater roared quietly at our feet, where, too, F.G.'s spotted dog, Nosey, was curled up. "I went to town looking for a wife," Gust said. "There was a dance, at the O-Zone." "That disco place?" I asked. "Yeah. Jolene came over right away, and said, 'Hi.' She was looking for me. We lived together for a couple of months. It was going good. I went to her father, and asked him to give her hand to me. He said, 'Go ahead.' "I said to her: 'I'm not looking for a BITCH - but if you're willing to COOPERATE....' "Her father is a mechanic. He's saved me thousands of dollars on the truck. I give him wood." LAST TIME I'D HAD ANY ALCOHOL was one Christmas Eve about 5 years previous, when a professor lent me an apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd just hitched thru a blinding blizzard out of Colorado. Professor Emily Sneed was about to leave town, to take in some shows in New York between terms. I drank half a bottle of rye, finally stopped shivering, and read about Elijah hiding out from the persecutions of Ahab and Jezebel, then confronting the prophets of Ba'al - in the Old Testament, in a wonderful black-leather covered Bible. Then I laid my sleeping bag down on the thick rug on the floor of the study - African masks and Aboriginal dream-drawings all around - and slept til noon. Now, I stopped drinking, realizing my attention was beginning to spiral down into another dimension. Gust was yawning, across the table. F.G. showed no signs of weariness. He kept pouring schnapps from the bottle into his coffee cup, and from the coffee cup thru his huge blond strainer of a mustache. He was slight, with little metal-rimmed glasses, and pale gray eyes that gleamed when fueled by alcohol. It emerged that he had been a fireman in Bunyan. He got vaccinated, along with the other firemen, for the Shanghai Flu. Immediately he - and only he - came down with the disease. He lost all muscle control and strength - and his job. After a long period of wrangling - during which he gradually recovered about 90 per cent of his ability to control his movements - tho he'd lost the muscle strength he'd counted on for decades - there was a $30,000 insurance settlement. It seemed like a lot - at first. F.G. still had a house in Bunyan, and friends - and some hangers-on - who helped him dribble away the money in a number of bar-rooms, in small towns along the two-lane highway that runs thru the woods between Gust's place and Bunyan, which is half-way to Minnesota. F.G. and Gust had always been hunting buddies. F.G. used to pay Gust's father a small fee for the privilege of hunting on his land, for deer and bear. Gust set F.G. up in a trailer, put him to work fixing up the place, and building a sauna - and the first of a series of cleverly welded-together wood-burning stoves that F.G. was becoming locally famous for. F.G. GOT TO TALKING about when he was in the Navy, in the 60's. He'd fallen asleep sitting on a suitcase under the George Washington Bridge. He woke up with a car honking at him. The driver drove him right to his base in Rhode Island: "You're too sleepy to hitch any more, Swabbie." Now Gust told how he had hitchhiked to Houston, Texas, wearing his top-hat and tails, stayed in a fancy hotel in downtown Houston, then hitched back north. He had got a ride into the ghetto in Chicago, where the car he was in was surrounded by a group of black youths, who questioned his presence. "I'm just a poor chimney-sweep from Lake Superior!" he had said. They laughed. They loved it. And Gust proceeded home. "DID YOU EVER GO SOUTH?" Gust asked me. "You know who James Meredith was?" I asked him. "No." "First Black to enter the University of Mississippi." "What about him?" "Later on, he said he'd walk THRU Mississippi, from north to south. First day out, he got his legs shot out from under him. I was with CORE then." "What's that?" "Congress of Racial Equality." "Oh." "I was in a group that went south to march along the path he'd said he was going to follow. People came from all over the country - thousands." "Hundreds of thousands?" F.G. asked, sarcastically. "No," I said, carefully. "Maybe 2 or 3 thousand. "Dozens of State Patrol cars passed the car I went down there in, with 4 other students, black and white - and the faces of those patrolmen said that they were NOT friendly. "My group slept on the floor of a church in Jackson the night we got there. "I remember, in the morning, we went thru a line, and got Spam and creamed corn and Kool-aid. Then we rode in the back of a pick-up truck, to join the rest of the marchers, who were already walking down the middle of the highway. "We marched about 20 miles that day. The highway was so hot, it seemed to WAVER. "I was walking alongside an elderly man, short, dark brown skin, with a little gray beard. He said he lived in New York, now, but he'd left Mississippi 30 years ago - and he'd never expected to live to see THIS. "A medic came by, and gave me some white cream to put on - against sun-burn - and I offered some to this old guy. "'Don't you know Blacks don't need that!' he said. "I was embarrassed, and stopped talking with him. I think I was 19. "Toward the end of the day, Stokely Carmichael - you know who he was?" "No," Gust said. "Well, he was a young black guy - a leader of the sit-ins in, I think, North Carolina. He wasn't as diplomatic as Martin Luther King, so he didn't get as much or as good publicity. Later I heard he was living in west Africa. He gave a speech, standing on the bed of a pick-up parked along the highway. He said that the Whites should go home, and work among the Whites - that's where the trouble was. He said that the Blacks needed to lead the Blacks, here. "That night, on a stage in an athletic stadium at Tupelo College, Marlon Brando - the movie star - gave a speech. I don't remember what he said. And James Brown sang, 'This Is a Man's World.' Scared me to death - he was dressed so - outrageous - pastel blue, frilly stuff men don't wear - and prancing - a kind of strip-tease, singing so...provocative - real high tones - falsetto - into the microphone - so that it must have carried half-way back to Jackson. "I was scared before he started, anyway. I thought the police or Ku Klux Klan would attack any minute - and that he was just INVITING them. "My group went back to college, next morning." "Well - and now there's integration," F.G. said, flatly. "Yeah - but what about justice?" I said. "For the Blacks?" Gust asked. "For everybody." NEXT MORNING, I WALKED ALONG RUSTED RAILS - ore-pellets still trickle in, in hopper cars, from the Mesabi Range, to the docks in Frozen Fish. I walked a couple of miles, to Beaver Hat - a few dozen buildings clustered on either side of the road, in the woods - to visit Phil Berra, proprietor of Berra's Market. The canned goods on the shelves were dusty, and there was nothing I'd go out of my way to feed on there - but when it's cold enough, there's enough snow, the road's glare-ice, and you can't get to Manitou - where the produce is a bad joke, too - the store means survival til a day when you can get better. Ten years ago, Mr. Berra had been my oldest student in an evening Great Books class, loving KING LEAR. I would assign the members of the class different roles to read aloud. We all had to shout, because Mr. Berra couldn't hear very well. "Lyle Aaron!" he greeted me, with a grin. "Truth must to its kennel!" he declaimed - the fool's line from LEAR. "Ach, I'm just treading water," he said, quickly sobering. "Sorry I ever came here. You used to teach Socrates - you still believe that stuff?" "Yes." "You know what you remind me of? A holy man going up the - what is it? - Ganges. Why did you stop teaching at the college?" "Well - I have a mission." "You're the only person I know with a mission." "Didn't you tell me that you had a mission behind Japanese lines, in Xinjiang, during the Second World War?' "That's ancient history - they called it Sinkiang, then." I SPENT MOST OF THE DAY ALONE IN THE TRAILER, drawing five-line staffs across sheets of paper, practicing chord progressions, toughening the callouses on my fingertips, recalling the arrangements of the songs that, despite my efforts - 5 years in L.A. - weren't about to be recorded. After supper, Gust, one of Gust's sisters (another bright young blond), F.G., and I quickly gathered in the crop of potatoes from Gust's huge garden, in a cold drizzle building to a storm. "Give me some help with this, will you?" I said, straining to pick up a huge pail of potatoes. The sister gave me a look of contempt, and came over to pick it up, herself. But, when she couldn't lift it, either, we carried it together, to the root cellar - where hundreds of huge onions were also stored. I was washing up, after, in a huge room in Gust's house, in the corner of which were a shower, toilet, and sink, when Ruth, the voluptuous blond 16 year old - Gust's daughter from the long-ago affair - raised by her mother, til so insubordinate she'd been shipped to Gust in hopes some discipline could be effected - sauntered in, wearing only a little shiny slip. Putting her long hair up over her head, then letting it drop halfway down her back, she asked me, poking out a hip and a lip, and purring, whether I liked it better this way, of THIS way? "Ruth, you look very nice, either way. If you were 10 years older, and I was 10 years younger, and I had the time and resources, I'd want to get to know you." She retreated, confused. I gripped the sink, and sighed. JACK PINE, WHITE and BLACK SPRUCE, TAMARACK. Broad leaves, quaking aspen, white birch, balsam, poplar. Gravel trails. When the down-pour ended, Gust killed a partridge for the breast. I walked in the woods with him, quietly, without a gun. He shot its head off, clean, swiveling in a smooth, instinctive half-circle, from the hip, apparently without aiming. Soft woods cut for pulp. When the colors drained from the sky, you could see the planets and stars clear as bulbs. F.G. CAME BACK TO THE TRAILER from painting a relative's porch. He'd had a run of good luck. Painted 16 hours in 2 days, told to quit, paid for 20, fed a shrimp dinner - "All I could eat!" - and told to come back for the same deal, next week. He began pouring from a bottle of schnapps, first into the coffee cup, then into his liquid reflections concerning what had happened to his old, fireman's life - trying to develop a smooth transition into his current life, whatever it was - dredging up, from the back of the mind, some kind of integration of disparate elements - plans, being thwarted, accidents, pleasant surprises, and random, unpreventable events.... "I found out everyone can be replaced," he told me. "I can't be." "I hear you saying you do everything different from everybody." "Not everything. But SOME things. Those are the ones I mention. The rest, I don't." "You're not arrogant, or anything." If F.G. and I were going to share the trailer even one more night, I would have to resist replying. I WOULDN'T HAVE KNOWN, ANYWAY, HOW TO ARTICULATE that I was aware that it was possible that I was trying to do what I could NOT do. That it might be wiser to give up, to try to survive and thrive with as much grace as possible, causing as little trouble as the next person. But maybe I COULD do what I had begun trying to do, since - after being overwhelmed by despair all my youth - it occurred to me that I MIGHT, POSSIBLY transform the situation, IF I RISKED ATTEMPTING IT TO THE BEST OF MY ABILITY - in spite of the general lack of comprehension, cooperation, respect, and resources available for the purpose - and approximately everyone else's enthusiastic or reluctant pouring of their commitment, their wills - into the success of the way things were. NEXT MORNING, F.G. HEADED OUT to visit some friends and relatives, and to see what kind of work he could turn up. After fighting off my fear of the immediate future sufficiently, I practiced my guitar-work a while, then began fitting the various elements of my gear into the back-pack. F.G. showed up, showered, dressed. A couple of his hunting friends were coming. First, tho, he and I were invited for supper, with Gust and his family. In the house, Ruth called from another room, that she wasn't hungry. "So many people in that bar," F.G. was saying, "you had to go outside to change your mind!' (I've heard many people in the Great Lakes and North Woods region tell this particular joke, with great relish. Jokes are at a premium where work is mainly silent and solo.) The two hunting friends showed up, and off they went, with F.G., rifles in hand. Shots, silences, shots. Then - we were still at the table - the hunters returned, soaked. They'd killed a big stag. It was a week before legal hunting season. Gust went to help them set up the skinning in the shed. "Join the gang!" he said, returning, and pulling up a chair. F.G. came in, sat, and cleaned his rifle, teasing the children: "Turkey turds and rainwater for supper!" I went to the trailer, and fell asleep for a little while. When I woke, I stood among the pines, in the rain - by two bloody deer forelegs and an overturned pail. "You've got to get along with other people!" Gust, a little liquored-up, came out to advise me. F.G. WAS SLEEPING IN THE UPPER BUNK. He had a roof to repair - at the friend of an uncle's - next morning, he had said. I considered a hand-lettered sign he had taped to a half-length mirror on the door of the tiny shower and toilet closet: THE ONLY WAY TO GET BACK ON YOUR FEET IS TO GET OFF YOUR ASS Tho he wasn't going to let me like him, I admired the way he had come back from tragedy. WHEN MY BACK-PACK WAS MORE OR LESS PACKED, and I was trying to figure out what I had forgotten, and how to handle the leave-taking, I picked and ate a small sweet apple. In the trailer, I finished writing out the music - as detailed as possible - as well as the lyrics of the songs I was afraid would be lost in the turmoil and struggle for survival ahead. My beard was growing back. I ate the last of the roasted soy beans I'd bought at the health food store, walking to the highway ramp, in Los Angeles. Little twisted apple trees, on a hill, in cold wind, under gray sky. The drone of an airplaine disturbed some ducks, who flapped into a quacking flight. Others have places, families, jobs - I thought. People ask them what they do. They can tell them, in just a word or two - to their own, and to the others' satisfaction. Meadows, forest, creeks fast with high water. Water on the long driveway, and on the road. The leaves of trees turning yellow. Green-needled pines and green-scaled cedars. F.G.'s dog, Nosey, was sick in the trailer, where I had gone to get my pack and guitar. I cleaned up the mess. As I was walking to the highway, Nosey tried to follow me. I shooed her away. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #568 Underground eXperts United 2000 uXu #568 Call Terraniux Underground -> +46-8-7777388 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------