BrinkZINE: Penmanship, A Shovel, The Dead

Penmanship, A Shovel, The Dead

for Chuck Prophet, brother mine

January is an excellent and popular time to die.

Not very surprisingly, it seems to require a considerable bit of oaken-wood-cask time to have the properly spoiled taste of the real corn McCoy, or even to have noticed the length of the obituaries, duking it out with the After The Holiday sales. It appears to my scaly eye that one must first grow old to be aware of the obvious. Makes for a rather odd mood, but maybe if newsprint is to survive, every month should secede from our Church calendar and vote to become January. They drop like flies.

Newspapers might survive and maybe the American Association of Retired People would declare penury, and be forced to strike its greedy tents. That would make for a lovely day in January, the last month when the earth is reliably soft enough to dig a grave. I can think of several clever popular music songs about grave-digging, but they aren't very hummable for most of those who've had the beans and bread rely on the $250 grave-opening fee most cemeteries will offer one man with his shovel. This is something I have much experience with.

And you're a poor man. Not broke, not tight this month. You are a poor man, selling your own blood poor, getting a can of field peas and snaps as hot as you can before scooping them fast as you can into the wide-mouth Thermos jar with a silent and hopeless prayer that maybe it'll be slightly warm when your dinner break finally arrives. An old Southern idiom: what others call lunch we call dinner. The reason for this is a matter of economics: the farmer was responsible for feeding the hands their noon meal and smart farmers realized that well-fed hands were inevitably grateful enough to offer a more-than-fair day's labor. So lunch became dinner. Returning home, the farmhands had to supply their own grub and they ate light. So dinner became supper.

Riding the Media/Wawa/West Chester express in January is nothing more than better than walking. Getting on at the Swarthmore stop, nice, genteel and -- you'd bet a dollar -- decent people grow flustered and then entranced away, in any direction but yours. A man with a lunch pail and a shovel is no welcome sight come the inevitable January. Not when even fresh-washed overalls look faintly muddy and no amount of imagination can summon up an inviting guess at what's to eat inside that pail. Nor what that shovel's apt to be for.

You might as well be a smart and cautious bird, the ones said to know how to count. Them and the ravens, they rule the boneyard, strut with the absolute ownership of calm. Killed one once with a thrown pocket knife; it's just a flick, nothing much for a smart bird to dodge. Crafty release, all there is to it. Like all bodies, it was heavier than I expected. Like my every other wish, mine that day wasn't granted. That raven wasn't flying no more. Threw the carcass into a Bobcat-dug hole over on the Reform and Conservative side. Tossed enough dirt to hide the black feathers. Somebody in 1971 got buried with a murdered raven, but I doubt either of them minded much by then. Fuck: maybe they laughed. Wonder what a chuckle would sound like through six feet of shitty soil? My smoked and pickled rumble, maybe.

If everyone wasn't cold enough before you board the train, they grow bone-chilled if they accidentally glance in your direction. Needless worries: I'll be sweating before they see William Penn's statue downtown. People, poor ones, still open graves by hand and there are many protocols and intricasies involved. If the dead personage is Orthodox or even Conservative, such nuisances as, say, diabetes requiring amputation, the sliced-off limb or organ gets its own burial perhaps many years before the rest of the carcass comes to join it. This disinterment is not a job for the front-end-loader nor for even the daintier Bobcat.

And answer me this: how can a man so brilliant as to devise a situation which credibly places a murdered raven and a diabetic Jew in the same grave, and then manages to call a Bobcat delicate possibly make any sort of sense to an ordinary reader? Beats me, but who'd want to anyhow?

But in order for the dead leg to have a tearful reunion with the rest of the non-practicing, only culturally observant Jewish attorney at law, a shovel man is needed. Even the softest-handed Bobcat operator will play hell with that little (inevitably rotted) box with the leg in it.

In truth, it isn't simply a shovel. I've always relied on several, each with their own attributes, not to mention tarpaulins, a 100-lb tile scraper, a set of freshly sharpened hole-diggers, mattock, sledge, coils of sturdy rope,

and at least two gallons of potable water. Hard-ass work it is. I did it summers (and after school in the Autumn) during those cloudy draft-lottery days. And on-call. But those uncomfortable not-stares on the upscale train in those already hot mornings or still-freezing ones: I cannot forget them. A reasonable guess would be that probably few of the commuters would have imagined that I was thinking mantra-like, in rolling tidal waves, with the vast black skies and the sort of thunder flirting with the sort of lightning that strikes an empty beach making brand-new fossils of melted sand and the indescribable glass fossils -- gone with the tide -- of fulgurites.

What I wanted to shout in thunder was merely, "I'm sorry."

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wouldn't wish to look at me any more than you do.

I didn't want to be poor. I didn't want to be so ashamed. I didn't want to be the walking man whistling innocently past the last rites. The unction, the extreme unction, or whatever Christian people recieve in their suffering. Mainly, though, I simply didn't want to be poor any more.

So I was hoping for Jews to die like clockwork, Hey! Mathematics and bitter poetry to my rescue, finally. I had been calling for reinforcements for a while, but Major Reno was not to be found and the fucking red Indians were proving to be more of a handful than I had counted on.

Of course, my hair was blonde and I was young and strong and full of myself. I stared into the long distance pensively at the very least. (Such notions are available to all of the poor, especially to the poor who've luckily discovered poverty and a smattering of brains to be foolproof pussy bait for certain monied young women.)

If I buried five Jews a week at Mount Sharon, I'd be making $1,250 a week -- an unimaginable fortune in 1971, 72. Dead Jews would buy me a new Chevrolet and keep me another step ahead of the draft police. I could walk to the Swarthmore station (and the Quakers there would spare me the stares) and walk from the Secane station to Mount Sharon.

Life, always the uninvited boor -- the stupid, leering, slobbery uncle whose nose whistled and breath stank of eating unimaginably desecrated things -- intervened in its clever fashions. Digging graves is very hard work. No living human can singlehandedly dig five of them in a week unless there is a Sabbath sixth or seventh dug for the digger. And the Jewry doesn't die according to the convenience of any calendar.

Worse still, my only prospects were in graves in areas even the tidy Bobcat couldn't reach -- plots sold a long time before the days I'm speaking of, themselves (a nice manner of thinking of years) fled nearly two generations ago. So my $250 per opening left twelve hundred dollars a week a pauper's wild and wishful dream.

I wonder if I should tack on the unseemly details of the partial openings -- which were hallelujah jobs for my shovel, and my simple inability to veer from my broad definition of decency. Why not?, I wonder. It should serve well as a description of poverty. I dug gently, only my shovel, a sensitive extension of my arm itself. When I found rotted chunks of wood I switched to a spade taken from the tool shed. And I used one of the shed's summer screen windows as for an archeological sieve. Perhaps oddly -- but perhaps not, I don't know, never having anything remotely resembling an education -- you'll find the toes first. Perhaps they float above the severed leg as clouds bearing meaning only in a world we suppress the merest thought of.

Toes first, inevitably disordered, but in my experiences always higher in the strata than the heavier stuff I needed to prove I had done my work honorably. The toes looked like dirt and I never thought to wear gloves. I've had an embarrassingly meager exposure to latex in my life.

A warning here: this talk of Jews and dead Jews may make the nostrils quiver with a hint of anti-semitism. If that's the case, slap your cheek as hard as you can force yourself to and call yourself a stupid goddamnned fool loud enough for someone else to overhear. Mount Sharon, in Springfield/Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania merely happens to be where I found work where I could labor off the books so as to remain beneath the government's very intent gaze. And although it is indeed a Jewish cemetery, even back then Mount Sharon set aside a generous Potter's Field for a small community of very poor southern blacks who had a now-vanished shantytown called Oak Hill then nearly hidden in these weathy suburbs.

The nature of the Potter's Field tradition is recorded in Jewish history and in the Christian appendix to the Hebrew Bible, by which I mean the New and the Old Testaments. According to Matthew's version of the aftermath of the death of Jesus, Judas Iscariot again went before the high priests and elders of the temple at Jerusalem in order to return the money he had accepted to betray Jesus. Saying it was "blood money" the elders refused to allow the money back into the temple's coffers. Judas is said to have thrown the pieces of silver at them before turning away.

Some accounts report that Judas killed himself by hanging immediately afterward and that the elders pondered over what to do with the blood money, finally deciding that they would use the blood fee to buy a nearly worthless piece of ground and set aside to bury "strangers and paupers." Strangers meaning foreigners and paupers meaning Jews with no surviving kinsmen.

My grandfather was buried in an unmarked grave in a Potter's Field. Pauper's graves mean quite a lot to me.

I often ate my dinner down in the shade of the Potter's Field. Nobody bothered me and there was a grave I liked to look at. I had only noticed it because a professor of music from Swarthmore College (and a fellow member of Swarthmore Friends Meeting) told me it was there. Sure enough, downhill from the graves of 10,000 Jews, I found it: Bessie Smith's final resting place. After finding it, I'd bide my time there, hoping to avoid the summer-help grounds crew -- among whom was my soon-to-become brother in law. The grass cutters ate lunch at a bar not far away on Baltimore Pike and they invariably returned to work late and drunk.

They loved that bar; video games had just been introduced, and the Stanley Cup Tavern had a Pong machine. The few times I went with them, I came back just as drunk as they were but I was repulsed by a suburban meanness in them that morphed into the frenzy of a privileged and ugly mob when they drank together.

So mainly I ate my beans with Bessie Smith. Eventually, I noticed something that seemed not at all right, a disturbing discrepancy. Although Bessie's dates were chiseled into the stone, it didn't require a detective nor splendid deductive reasoning to be convinced that Bessie's gravestone couldn't possibly have been 40 years old. On Sunday, after Meeting at Swarthmore Friends, I mentioned my confusion to my Quaker music professor pal and he grinned from ear to ear.

"Well, now I know for certain you actually have made the trip to that great woman's grave. And at least you were observant enough to notice the wristwatch in Ben Hur," he said, and, at 18,

I was too young to have realized what a pompous fucking thing to say that was. I got his point, but it had yet to occur to me that middle-aged men could behave just as ridiculously as any 13-year-old still staggering after the anvil of puberty had fallen on his cartoon-strip head.

"Bessie's grave was unmarked since her death until the marker was paid for, rather unusually, by a nurse from Galveston, Texas." His erudtion made him levitate slightly, and -- I suspect -- made his dick get a bit twitchy.

"That's weird," I said.

"Not at all, not at all. I'm told the nurse -- or former nurse, I should say -- was deeply influenced by Bessie and shares many traits and characteristics with her: drunkenness, violence, bisexuality and a voice fit for the Devil's choir."

He waited for me to ask for the punchline but even then I knew better than to do so.

"The nurse's name, you see, is Janis Joplin," he said. "And she paid for the stone out of her first record company advance." And Jesus Fucking Egypt was that bastard ever proud of himself.

He seemed ancient to me at the time, but I realize he was at least 15 years younger than I am as I write this wandering and melancholy remembrance. And he was fairly close to being accurate. Google bessie smith janis joplin and you'll get all manner ofcontradictory bullshit. Wikipedia's entry is as close as any you're likely to find but it's riddled with errors of fact -- from the name of the cemetery to the township where it's located. At the time I'm writing about here, from the spring until the winter of 1971, the gravestone was barely two years old; I know: I checked.

The caretaker was surprised, far more than mildly, to find his gravedigger asking for the records for a plot in the Negro Potter's Field. But he pulled the file and indeed the stone was less than two years old. The bill of lading and the payment in advance for perpetual care for the plot listed two names -- Janis Joplin and Juanita Green. Mrs. Green, I later discovered I knew (but only very slightly) from attending a tiny African-American church, Primitive Baptist in the now-vanished Oak Hill shantytown. Mrs, Green's mother, as a young woman, had been Joplin's hired help in Philadeplhia.

And that's where I sat on an overturned five-gallon bucket feeling very lonesome and homesick for the South, under a willow oak by Bessie Smith's grave.

I suppose that jackass of a music professor did me another favor by suggesting that I read Edward Albee's short play, "The Death of Bessie Smith" (1960). A drama teacher in high school -- the school itself no more than two miles from the cemetry -- had taken a shine to me and cast me in a number of productions there and at Villanova University. I got strangely glowing reviews, and lots of people who believe most anything they read began to think of me as an actor and one who got paid for it.

I hated it, but the drama teacher was a crafty one: she almost always cast me as a brooding and melancholy man, and that damn sure wasn't straining my limits to portray. I know now that she was also trying to direct me away from prize fighting
but I put up with the acting shit because we both wanted to keep spending time together while we figured out what we were up to, where we were going. Did I end up in love with her? Yeah. And she with me? So she said. But she was already married and I was fixing to marry the grass-cutter's sister. I mention my son and my daughter fairly often in these ethereal pages; the grass-cutter's sister is their mother.

And that's the story I was going to write for you, mi companero, but it came out all arty, in my usual jumble of techique -- fact and fiction, prose and poetry all tossed into my super collider. Which never has really suited your taste I suspect, so you get this rambling and mournful elegy instead, free of artifice.

(Albee's Bessie Smith one-act deal, by the way, is the work of a shrill and not-particularly-bright child. I spent a good bit of time with him in Moscow 19 years ago, in the waning days of the USSR; he did not like me and I did not like him and I was tempted to point out his grievous and unforgivable breaches of art and of fact, but I let it slide. But I told him I once knew a troubled fellow whose name had been snatched away from him and who used to quite often eat his lunch near Bessie's grave. Albee smirked and said "Perhaps advice you might keep until you can grasp it is that a poor imagination can't be remedied by an overactive one." He couldn't be bothered with learning at least 'thank you' in Russian,

so I told every waiter we ever had that he was a famous American game show host named Ivan Zalupya -- which translates roughly into Dickhead Joe.)

Because for many years, more than 30 know, memories of Mount Sharon or of Bessie Smith have always reminded me of a singular horror I witnessed in that cemetery.

It was toward the end of the summer and the grass-cutters' boozy lunches grew longer and longer as their back-to-college time neared. I was sitting alone with my shovel, waiting for a Jew to die one day when I heard a startling, thunderous crash followed by coarse laughter. After another crash I followed the sounds until I came upon the grass-cutters gathered in the middle of one of the cemetery's bigger sections, between the narrow roads and virtually safe from the caretaker's view. They were sharing from bottles of whiskey and their beer cooler looked nearly full.

And they were tipping grave stones.

Among the oldest, most ornate and most expensive of the Jewish grave markers were huge granite carvings fashioned into realistic sculpture of trunks of the Cedars of Lebanon, cut square at both ends to signify the beginning and the end of the life of those buried below, It took two or three, maybe four of the grass-cutters pushing hard to get the massive stones rocking enough to tip. They were so tall they'd land aop a marker from the next row and then break into large sections.

At Mount Sharon and maybe at other cemeteries as well (I know little about them; I've tried hard to avoid any boneyard since that afternoon) many of the stones from the first third of the 20th century also bore photographs of the dead. Photographs of the departed are transferred to photographic emulsion on porcelain ovals which are weather-proofed and then attached to the marker itself.

It was strange when I first saw the grave of an old woman bearing a portrait of her as a woman in full bloom with the words I love you, Rachel written in her own hand.

It was far worse to see some of the grass-cutters using the pointed blades of their hand clippers to smash the delicate portraits while the others tipped the petrified wood of the cedar towers. I watched only long enough to think about stopping them, then I turned and gathered my pail and my shovel and walked to the train station to ride home. Because I could have stopped them. They were badly drunk and I wasn't -- and there wasn't one among them who didn't fear me physically. But I did not stop them. All I could think is They break things and I break people, so who's worse?

And this is as far as I got, Penrod. I knew what it meant to me, but I couldn't find words to speak this story's truth until today.

As friends will, a friend gave me what I needed without even intending to. My friend's grandmother died and he wrote a few words about her which he shared with a number of us who are long-time friends and stay in daily contact through the stage fog of the internet. A few details before he takes the stage: My pal is famously illiterate, although quite a bright man. An ex-marine, he served on the Reagan's color guard both at the White House and at Camp David. Tough as nails, every bit my equal in a bar fight. I cover his back, he covers mine. Once, two really fairly femme-ish lesbians beat us in 17 straight games of nine-ball at the Lizard Lounge in Arlington Virginia.

About his grandmother's death, he wrote:

Today, I sat in my grandmothers chair which was in her living room. She used to do lots of "find a word" type puzzles. You know the type of puzzels I'm talking about, where you circle a word hidden in within a bunch of other words. I read the notes she had written on the side of her puzzles. She had very nice penmanship.

She had left one slipper by the side of her chair in the living room...I picked up her slipper and I smelled her slipper. I put her single slipper in her bedroom with her other slipper. I thought, jeez, you don't have time to pick up and make things neat tidy before you die do you. Seeing that one singular slipper by her chair made me cry. It was just a sign of things left undone.

I smelled her bedroom, I layed in her bed and looked around her bed room. I smelled her bed room. It was a sweet smell. It was an old ladies bed room. Things hadn't changed in that bed room since the 60's....at least. I'm sure there were things laying around that room since the 40's.

I left her bedroom and went back to the living room and sat back in her chair. I looked around. I noticed she had dropped a knitting needle in between the night table and her chair,

I picked up her knitting needle and put in her knitting box.

I emptied her ash tray for her.

She had a candy bar wrapper (Reeses) dropped on the floor by her knitting needle Yes Pat, she liked Reeses. I picked up her Reeses wrapper and threw it away in the small trash can by her chair. I emptied her trash can for her.

I had a nice visit with my grandmother today and I tidied up a little bit for her since she didn't have time to do it.

Small, slender words, beautifully free of sentimentality. You remember I told you once that sentiment -- usually a bad thing -- is most often a matter of an artist trying to elicit his own emotions from a reader? And poignancy is a matter of the reader's own feelings evoked by the author's words. That's a very good thing.

I don't much believe in lessons from the past. It's the lessons learned up to any given today which explain the unlearned lessons of the past. I was just as lonesome and confused and homesick, sitting on that bucket, as I said I was -- fearful and angry and wanting my name back. But I was also stunningly self-centered and humorless. I felt horribly and unsalvageably empty, bankrupt. But I know now that when you feel emptiest, most hollow, if you look hard enough within, you'll find one thing left of value, worrth having, worth being proud of.

And that's what you should give away.

None of the grass-cutters got fired -- the damage wasn't discovered until their colleges were back in session. Eventually, though I did. Mount Sharon is surrounded by a 10-feet tall wrought iron fence with only two gates. I was sitting on my bucket waiting for someone to kick their own when I watched a late-model Cadillac slowly pass the side gate and drive on at least another two hundred yards before parking about 20-feet from where I sat.

Very, very slowly a wizened old woman with ten or twelve ounces of make-up more than even bad taste would have required, crawled out from behind the wheel and doddered unsteadily over to where I sat on the other side of the (obviously unbroken) line of fence. My face felt funny and I realized that it might be difficult not to laugh at this misfit.

She addressed me with great charm. "You. Sonny! How do I get in here?"

I said "Lady, you've got to die."

Had my pink slip and my last check within 10 minutes. And I laughed from that graveyard all the way home.

Everyone's going to need to cry sometimes, but you have to learn to laugh first,

REACTIONSAscending | Descending

GUY NEAL WILLIAMS

Wednesday, 18 March 2009

A Note To Readers, If Any:

My apologies for the appearance of this submission, and for the visible wingdings and the misplaced italics. If this piece sucks, so be it, but it damn sure didn't look anything like this after using the save and close option, the edit function and the view option. The difference between what I prepared and what appeared is very disappointing, and my intent in the last few paragraphs is fully obscured by a now unavoidable confusion over what was quoted from a friend's words and what was written for the body text of this piece.

I'm plenty aware of my frequent incompetence, but I followed the instructions to a tee this time out. And this bears virtually no resemblance to what I saw when using the recommended publishing functions.

with my regreats

GN Williams

CHUCK PROPHET

Friday, 20 March 2009

Here's to broken things, broken people, love, redemption and manual labor. Put it all in there, hold the manual labor.

DAN STUART

Saturday, 21 March 2009

I live on an island of cemeteries... for awhile I did my cardio work in a former morgue for the poor farm that is now a rec center. We all should picnic in cemeteries like they used to do across the harbor at Greenwood before Central Park was built. Death and angels...

DANNY VINIK

Thursday, 26 March 2009

Guy - about touchbase with us - email me directly - and we can set up a time where we can troubleshoot and look more closely at what went wrong in the upload.

GUY NEAL WILLIAMS

Thursday, 26 March 2009

Sure thing.

BURNINGSAND

Friday, 17 April 2009

I laughed.

GUY NEAL WILLIAMS

Friday, 17 April 2009

You know, Mister or Mrs. Burning Sand or whoEVER: I just have to say that, well gosh, "I laughed" is the nicest comment I could expect to recieve. I laughed as well, Mr. Sand; it would be an honor to shake your hand some day.