What would you have worn? A bathrobe?
Well, yes. Except that I prefer to call it a dressing gown.
I guess it would depend on whether the Fates were weaving his destiny to resemble a character from Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
The truth’s actually a bit dull.
I was in costume for the dress rehearsal of a Shakespeare night benefit for the community theater in the town 20 miles to the north. The whiteface was because the first scene was from MacBeth and I was playing Banquo’s ghost and the toga was for the Mark Antony eulogy scene and I was making sure it fit and didn’t have rips. (It had been made by my mother for my brother some years before when he was president of the Latin Club at his high school.)
It had rained earlier in the day and the master bedroom roof was leaking. We noticed this when I was already in costume and climbed up on the roof to see if we could find the source and staple-gun some mylar onto it. The gladius was in a scabbard that attached to the costume so I had it anyway. After we finished stapling down the mylar I asked my mother to listen to the Mark Antony soliloquy since the acoustics up there were pretty good and I didn’t have to speak over the television, Aunt Carrie or the dog (a yippy little Pekingese).
Or as others have said, “A Shakespearean character on the roof? Sounds crazy, no? But here in our little village of Weokahatchee you might every one of us is a Shakespearean character on the roof, trying to… well, okay, not really, but there’s a logical explanation.”
Y’know, at this point, we really need a family tree, like the one they print in the books about QE II and how the British/European Royals are all related. The House of Weokahatchee must be drawn.
Oh, yeah: I want you around when I have to buy a casket and funeral.
Vlad/Igor
Winter (about February) 1987:
Things are at their nadir. My mother and I no longer go on the roof because we don’t show our face outside if we can help it. The car was repossessed at Christmas and we’re driving a beaten up Chevette that evolved as a way for transmission fluid to get from place to place, and though a far lesser vehicle than the repo’d Cavalier it’s actually paid for (worth: about $300- how we got it is a story unto itself that involves why I still have “issues” with my sister as much as I’d like to put them behind me). However, like the Cavalier it still gets parked in the woods, not to hide from the repossessor but to hide the fact we’re at home.
Totally broke, the house is frigid because it’s cold outside and there’s no money for gas and the good heater is in the den keeping Carrie and Dudley the bald Pekingese warm. (Dudley shares Carrie’s lap with Willie, the Cabbage Patch knockoff my mother got her a couple of Christmases ago that was one of the biggest “Bulls-Eye” Christmas gifts of all time- Carrie talks to Willie, sleeps with him, combs his hair, etc.- she hadn’t had a doll in more than 90 years and confesses she’d always wanted a store-bought one but thought it was selfish when “money was always so dear”.)
Anyway, my mother and I are holed up in the Master Bedroom, a huge and freezing room that we use because it’s at the back of the house, has foil over the windows (meaning one can’t see if you’re in there) and we’re hiding from process servers and perhaps deputies (who sometimes serve such papers). All money has gone for transmission fluid for my mother’s cigarettes and we’re living on fried chicken because a few weeks before leg quarters were $.19/pound as a leader special and my mother stocked up, and the oven is broken and can’t be fixed so anything baked is out. There are guns handy and there’s even been discussion of a suicide pact, though admittedly only by my mother, but I do think that if another sheriff comes with his pistol drawn like they did when they repossessed the car and arrested my mother (on a separate charge- she’d bounced a $10 check that she hadn’t redeemed because she couldn’t) the day before Christmas Eve there might be gunfire. And that I’m not so sure would be her only, for I’m a crack shot myself and I’m about to crack up myself twixt the urine smell and the constant moaning and groaning from Carrie and the total lack of money and the general sense of total abandonment and hopelessness.
My mother has tried everything to find a job, but when you don’t have a phone or reliable transport it just ain’t that easy, and she can’t leave because what would she do with Carrie and where would she live? She’s asked me many times to leave and move in with relatives, and if I did I could look for a job, but that would leave her stranded and alone, and if I took the car she’d have no transportation [such as it is] and if I didn’t I couldn’t get to work, plus there’s the fact that if I leave I know for a certainty she’ll kill herself. She just doesn’t want me there when she does it. She’s said as much when drunk, which is a lot more frequently than it used to be. And I don’t blame her for drinking and I still don’t, or for the fact she was suicidal.
All in all it’s not a place you’d expect to see in a Thomas Kincade painting and it would thoroughly suck as a setting for a Valerie Bertinelli comeback sitcom, though as the opening scene of a Tennessee Williams play it may have potential. Not sure where you’d get a bald Pekingese and a cabbage patch knockoff these days, but I know for a fact there are scratch’n’sniff cards for urine odor.
The only visitor we ever get these days is Jeanine, the frumpy hausfrau who smelled like a goat even before she had goats in her house, which had once been my grandmother’s house until she and her husband rented it when my grandmother was sent away. Well, sort of rented it- rent implies an exchange of money, and there’s not really any of that since her husband Rob was the only person on earth with worse luck of late than ours, though he brought it on himself.
Twenty years ago Jeanine was already the textbook illustration of hag. Jeanine about 42 but with “a face that looks like it’s worn out 5 bodies and is working on the 6th” and from one of those “if your live-in-boyfriend doesn’t molest your youngest daughter or your son you know you picked a good man” demographics of horror, one of those poor invisible women who are sexually experienced before puberty [sometimes consentually], grandmothers by 32, and if they ever see a happy resolution to anything in their lives you can rest assured they’re eating popcorn and doing so at the matinee because it’s cheaper. She’s one of those women, and there are so damned many of them, to whom God owes a public apology, a private explanation and an afterlifetime of reparations (as in if she spends one day in eternity not getting tonguebathed by one of 72 Ricky Martin clones it better damned well be because she’s in the mood for a Timberlake or else wants a free day to get fitted for her next Chanel).
But even so, Jeanine more than earned her keep in that house, because hag that she was she was a woman of MANY dimensions. Wish I had time to tell more, but short version is she was also a first rate liar and a professional con-artist at one time in her life. (She was also once a topless dancer which is damned sickening to imagine by ’87; not to say that there aren’t women of 42 who look damned good, but I’ve seen pictures and Jeanine was only a passably non-ugly 25 year old and that was back when she was 13 [and pregnant].) While nobody on Earth who’s outside of a maximum security prison deserves to see Jeanine’s boobies in 1987, I’ll admit without shame that her lying and her con-artistry have come in very handy for us over the past year and she is FIERCELY loyal to and protective of us.
Death-cracker-on-a-stick was this really my life I’m remembering? Yes, it was, but I swear it seems like it’s a really bad and melodramatic book I read.
Anyway, Jeanine is the only person we allow entrance to the house and that because she brings us occasional supplies, company, and knows the signal (knock twice on the boarded up French doors, then twice on the back door, then three times). She leaves after one of her visits one day and, quite atypically, forgets to lock the front door behind her. That’s the only reason Lou Ida was able to walk in unannounced.
So be that the case, into this happy home one day walks Lou Ida. Lou Ida has never knocked prior to entering incidentally, which is my mother’s major pet peeve where she’s concerned. Like most families who are in and out a lot we didn’t usually lock our doors in daytime but, to quote Mama, “Unlocked and open are two entirely different word” and it’s one of the reasons that to this day I will not walk without knocking into anybody’s house, be they closest friend or sibling.
On this particular day my mother is in her bed with the remnants of a cold and serious back pain. The latter is largely psychosomatic and she knows it is, but it doesn’t make it any less painful. (You can die from a psychosomatic illness.) If she has any serotonin in her brain it’s probably past due for repossession She’s too depressed to move and when she does it hurts.
Lou Ida stops at the sofa and speaks to Carrie for a moment. “Hey Aunt Carrie… are Blanche and Jon feeding you these days?”
“Why of course!” Carrie says, very pissed. “I’m here ain’t I?”
“Just wanted to make sure you were getting your nourishment. You don’t need to be going without at your age.”
“I shouldn’t be living at my age. I don’t recommend it. You here to see me or to spy?”
Carrie’s beginning to become a bit senile but she’s also one hell of a lot more likely to say what’s on her mind than she’s ever been in her life. Most of her inner monologue went up in flames with her sister and what survived has been burned for fuel since.
“Oh Aunt Carrie… you were always so clever…”
“So what do you want, Lou? I know you’re not coming to offer anything.”
“Ha ha ha. Where are Blanche and Jon?”
“They ain’t out here, are they?”
“Well… reckon I’ll try Blanche’s bedroom then…” and without an invitation she enters the sanctum sanctorum. I’m curled in a blanket on a broken recliner where I’ve been re-reading my third favorite Brigham Young biography (the one by Morris Werner) and my mother’s in bed.
“Hey… just dropped in to check on y’all. Don’t know when I’ve seen you. Ever’thing going all right?”
Mama: Not really. I’m sick. Broke. Things are pretty bad.
Lou Ida: I’m sorry to hear that. So who’s looking after Aunt Carrie while you’re sick?
Mama: Who’s always taking care of her? Me and Jon.
Lou Ida: I’m just worrying about her catching cold in here and getting enough nutrition.
{Because she works in a hospital kitchen the lay chiropractor now regards herself as quite the nutritionist as well, always analyzing meals.}
Mama: Are you volunteering to take her home with you?
Lou Ida: Well I would, but you know I work. You remember what that was like.
Mama: What was your excuse the times you didn’t? Or for not coming to visit with her or ever bringing her meals when we had to be out or taking her to church with you or taking her to your home on your off-days so we could clean her room and bathroom without embarrassing her?
{Former false civility has been body slammed by bluntness these days.}
Lou Ida: Well… I’ve been busy the past few years. Getting ready for retirement. And besides, til recently you did an okay job.
Mama: Yeah. Those first 25 years were hard but now I’ve about gotten the hang of it.
Lou Ida: Well, that’s why we gave you and Garland the land was to look after the old folks.
{Pause. I look up. She really shouldn’t have aid that.}
Mama {calmly}: Gave us? You gave us the land?
Lou Ida: Well… practically… that was the deal.
Mama: You didn’t give us a god damned thing! In fact your sorry ass thieving father went back on his deal and blackmailed Garland into giving him more money!
Lou Ida: If that’s your way of saying he threw in all but the 4 acres his house was on…
Mama: Threw it in my ass? He sold it for more than any other fool would have paid for it! Nobody was buying land here at the time but Garland and they still aren’t! This whole damned place has been for sale for almost five years and there hasn’t even been a damned nibble!
Lou Ida: Well, apparently the bank’s interested… that’s why I’m here today. Did you know that the First Union Bank has placed a lien on your land? It’s in the legals section of the Herald…
{No, she didn’t know this. At first it’s a shock but then it’s “oh what the hell… take it”.}
Mama: Well, I’m not surprised. I just hope they’ll have better luck liquidating it than I ever did.
Lou Ida: You wanted to sell your children’s birthright. I could never have understood that… if I’d ever had a child I wouldn’t have…
Mama: If you’d ever had a child it would have been unnatural cause there’s some things even God won’t touch! And that land is not my children’s, it is mine. My name was on the mortgage when there was one, I paid on that mortgage, I went without because of that land, I earned it. And if I wanted to by God sell it my one regret is nobody stupid enough to buy it could get the money.
Lou Ida: Well… the wise man builds his house upon a rock and the fool builds it on the sand.
{? Even at the time it didn’t make sense.}
Blanche: Only an idiot builds a house up here I’ll tell you that. It’s the worst mistake I ever made but I thought it was necessary to save the marriage. It was the marriage I should have let go of… but what choice did I have? He would never have paid support, he told me that, he’d go to jail first… and should I raise children on welfare? Give them a used toy each for Christmas? No, I couldn’t do that.
Lou Ida: Well Garland wasn’t that kind of man. He’d not have let them go without. It was you he wanted gone. He knew what you were even then just like I do now, and Lord knows I told him enough that marrying you was enough to incur the wrath of God…
{A funny choice for a turn of phrase since she’s about to see a demonstration. I’m out of my chair to take issue with that myself because I’ve heard enough- my mother’s in pain hardly able to move from back pain and cold and depression, but before I get out of my chair I witness something I wouldn’t see again until the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula= a seemingly mostly dead body rising as if on a plank straight up out of the bed. I’m sure it didn’t happen quite like that but that’s how I remember it.}
Mama: What am I exactly?
Lou Ida: You’re… you’re the kind of woman who would… who would take a gun…
Mama: Like this one? {The .22 she keeps under her pillow is liberated and fired into the air}
Lou Ida: You’re INSANE! YOU’RE A BITCH! YOU’RE A THIEV… ARE YOU GOING TO MURDER ME!
Mama: No. A waste of ammo. But for the first time in my life I am saying to somebody, get the fuck out of my house you waste of space and oxygen…
Lou Ida: This house was built by my cousin Garland and I will leave it when I…
Mama: You will leave it when I goddamned say so…
{And before my eyes the frozen Statue of Rage morphs into a Cheetah. Lou Ida’s hand is suddenly in my mother’s, then instantly it’s used to turn Lou Ida around [this is all lightning fast] and pinned behind her back and as Lou Ida yelps in shock and probably more than a bit of pain my mother, moving faster than I’ve seen her move in years, is bouncing her through the den, past Carrie, through the frozen shut off mostly empty [the decent contents sold] living room and, though I have no memory of how the mammoth front door was opened [did I open it? I don’t think so] Lou Ida’s pudgy tall stupid body is unceremoniously flung off the front porch and onto the sidewalk as she has to manage a pretty impressive move herself to right herself to avoid falling on all fours. Furious and shocked she turns and charges the door, which is still open for one reason only, and just as she says ‘BLANCHE! YOU…’ my mother times the woman’s advance with a clear look of “Wait for it…Wait for it… Wait for it…” and just as her face is three inches from the knocker
SLAM!!!
with enough force that every photograph on the wall falls off (not an embellishment, an actual detail) and my mother screams out
Mama: THINK OF IT AS A FUCKING ADJUSTMENT!!!
Lou Ida (through the door): I’LL BE BACK HERE WITH THE LAW!
Mama: And a body bag! If I see you here again you’ll need one, cause if I only have a chance to fire one shot I know who it’s gonna be!”
A few seconds later we hear the sound of an Impala door slamming, the car cranking and slinging gravel all the way down the driveway. When she’s gone my mother turns to me with the first look of hope she’s shown in forever and says
Mama: Oh God… oh God Almighty do you know… how many times… over the past twenty-five years almost that I have wanted to do that! And it felt even better than I thought it would! Oh Christ… I’m alive again! If only for now I feel alive! I feel pretty damned good even! I’m gonna go cook something… we have some charcoal here somewhere, I’m gonna light up the grill and barbecue. It might be thirty degrees outside but I’m sick to death of fried and boiled and stove chicken… WE ARE GONNA HAVE A BARBECUE!
{And there’s an actual smile on her face! I’d forgotten what that looked like. She looks deranged but happy, and after the past few weeks, I’ll definitely settle!
And as we pass through the den on the way to retrieve the charcoal we hear the question}
Carrie: Did Lou Ida leave already?
Me: Yes ma’am.
Carrie: She didn’t even tell me bye. She was raised better than that.
Lou Ida never came back with “the law[r]”, but then
-
What would the charge have been? “I was asked to leave a house for maligning a woman known for her temper and the fact she was once a wrestler and when I didn’t she threw me out? No, I mean she threw me out, as in to throw, as in with her hands and… yes, I am the woman who ran over the dead mule and gave an accident victim a spinal adjustment, what’s that have to do with anything?
-
She didn’t really have a chance and if she’d come with the Third Cavalry the odds were we wouldn’t have been at home. The Deus ex Machina started within the week after this event.
First, Carrie had a very mild stroke. When I went to check on her in her bedroom a couple of mornings later she was moaning on her bathroom floor. She’d fallen while dressing and, we later learned, damaged her pelvis. I drove like hell to the nearest neighbor with a phone and called an ambulance.
At the hospital a social worker notified us that she could not be left alone at all and would have to have physical therapy. Was there anybody who could be with her 24/7 or could pay for therapy? We told her the truth, no there wasn’t. We were in dire straits financially, the home we were living in had been foreclosed on months before and we didn’t even know how long we would be there.
“Well then, she’ll need a nursing home…”.
We explained that situation as well. “You’ll never get a relative to sign for permission and ironically we don’t qualify” and “she is absolutely terrified of nursing homes”.
“Let me see what I can do.” Her name was Patty Laughlin and she was a WONDERFUL human being, the first social worker ever to even try and help us (even if it was extenuating circumstances).
While all this was going on my mother almost fainted when she received a letter in the mailbox from a job she’d applied for a year ago. “We have been trying to contact you but do not have your current number. Are you still interested in managing the M____ Home for Retarded Adult Men? Please contact us at…” She contacted them, was hired on the spot, and the job paid a positively PRINCELY $12,000 per year. (Alright, even in 1987 that wasn’t big bucks, but when you’re living on approximately $10,000 per year less than that it’s a lot.)
The biggest DEUS ex machina: Jeanine’s husband Rob was hired to build a $14,000 wing onto a church. He went wild with the money of course buying VCRs and expensive toys for the kids and ran out of money to pay his crew LONG before the job was over which caused a lawsuit and other nasty business (but against him, obviously, not us for a change) but before he did he paid us $400 in back rent. You can’t imagine how much money that was. It paid the deposit on our new apartment (where the manager liked us and thus “forgot” to check our credit when we told her about it). Had Liberace not died it would have been a perfect by-god month.
And by March 1 we were gone and Locksley Hall was abandoned. The sheriff, a Masonic Lodge brother of my father’s and terrified of my mother (with reason= there were some “incidents” involving one of the attempts to repossess the car a couple of years before) seized the day after noticing for a week nobody was around and we were dispossessed- it took days for him and his men to take everything out of the house- but we were gone by then. And of course our good Christian neighbors in the county came from everywhere with their pickups to “save the furniture for Blanche and Jon” and so it was that for years we could barely go to a flea market without seeing some of our stuff (none of which was ever returned to us save for what Jeanine and Rob got to first), but, we got over it.
Several years later my mother was in the hospital for a broken leg and double pneumonia. Double pneumonia was about a once in three years occurrence for her but the broken leg [with exposed bone no less] part was new.
Going to visit her one day I was absolutely stunned- wondering for an instant if I’d gone insane- to see Lou Ida sitting on the edge of her bed. She’d been in the hospital herself for a routine procedure, was told “We have another Miz Sampiro here… Blanche…” and given the room number. She came into the room to see my mother and acted as if it were 1980 all over again, there’d never been a falling out and my mother had never tossed her from her house. Shocked and confused herself my mother went along with the charade, even when Lou Ida hugged her goodbye, though she did of course give her a fake telephone number when Lou Ida asked for it. (It was unlisted at the time.)
I walked Lou Ida out to her car for morbid curiosity’s sake and she didn’t sound at all bitter towards or mad at my mother. I wondered if she’d repressed the memory, until just as she was getting into the car she said “I’m so glad to know that the demons who possessed her let her go… were you there when it happened?”
“Uh… sort of…”
“I’d love to hear about it. Do you live with Blanche?”
“No” I lied, not sure why. The demons perhaps.
“Well what’s your number? I’d love to hear the story when you can talk without her being around…” And so with her second fake telephone number on a piece of scrap paper she crossed her legs and drove home.
And that was the last time I saw her until she wanted to open the coffin to get one last picture of me and my mother together at the funeral.
Ahem. “TRADITION!”
“Mama: THINK OF IT AS A FUCKING ADJUSTMENT!!!”
Oh, Lord, Sampiro, I haven’t laughed like that since, I…shit…still can’t breathe.
Wow unto tears.
Lou Ida called me when I lived in Georgia. I hadn’t heard that shrill voice in years but recognized it instantly with her first line: “You’ll never guess who this is!”
“Lou Ida.”
“You must have caller I.D.!”
She got my number from my brother (so sweet of him) and she called to discuss the family genealogy and find out if I had certain photocopies and papers that my father owned. I told her truthfully that all of my father’s papers and most of our books and everything else was left in Weokahatchee and the gods alone know what happened to it assuming there are gods and they care about my father’s papers.
“Well could you speculate where it might have got to?”
Thought: Well let’s see… 20 years ago it was put out on a lawn… my guess would be that it’s in a garage in Manitoba. A blue…NO NO NO …. Red garage… with, strange for Manitoba, olive trees lining the drive… and the style of the house is like a Frank Lloyd Wright re-imagining of Mount Vernon but the columns are shaped like palms and it’s only 309 square feet… ask for Raymond…NO…NO… Orville. Yeah, Orville, in Manitoba, with a candlestick in the study…and there’s a stewardess, a woodsman and a bison robe somehow involved.
Said: Nope.
We “caught up” on who all had died, who’d been arrested, why the next door neighbor (who admittedly lived 2 miles away) was shot several times at point blank range as his wife hid in the panic room (and for once Burl was probably right- a bunch of kids tryin’ to get some dope- the next door neighbor had a beautiful new house, several nice cars, a huge pool and no visible means of support, and a panic room). I tried politely to tell her I didn’t care about most of that stuff (other than the particularly sordid and the gossip about me and my mother- hard to believe that 20 years later they talk about us- supposedly I finally got off the cocaine [a drug that, like most, I’ve never done] and she had been released from electroshock or some such). After a while I stopped trying to get a word in, put the phone down, did some work, came back to say “ah hah” when I heard the noise stop once in a while and that was it. She asked for my home number and I gave it to her, though somehow I forgot to tell her I was moving in a few days and it would be disconnected.
She also began calling my mother to ask about the same frigging genealogy sources. My mother was courteous at first, finally told her- with surprising restraint- “I don’t know, I don’t care, please stop calling” and since then just didn’t pick up the phone when she was on the caller I.D…
A few days after the funeral I picked up the only phone in the house that doesn’t have Caller I.D. and she led with something memorable.
“Jon, guess what? I finally found Tanner Gray’s grave!”
“Did you?”
“Yes! It was in a cemetery overgrown with weeds near the dam in Tallassee” and she proceeds to give me detailed directions how to get there. I finally had to ask as a matter of curiosity “Who’s Tanner Gray?”
“Oh I assumed you knew! You love history and all. He was the grandson of Lucius Gray, whose sister Susanna married Da’ Jim’s father John Wesley Sampiro, so he was daddy’s third cousin which makes him mine and your daddy’s fifth and your sixth, but more important, you remember Anna Jane Sampiro?”
“Not offhand…”
“Ma’s youngest daughter. Kitty and Carrie’s baby sister, she was born in 1901…”
Oh, that Anna Jane. Of course. How silly of me.
“The one who died when she was a baby back in 1903?” I ask. The main reason I remember this dead infant was that I used to sometimes handle her hair which was tied in a ribbon and laid on the family lararium (about which more in the concluding post) and even though it happened 63 years before I was born her death was the only thing I ever knew Kitty and Carrie to cry about prior to Kitty’s burning. (They’d get tears when she was mentioned.)
“Yes! Well, when she was sick with scarlet fever and died it was Tanner Gray that took care of her. And nobody, nobody knew where he was buried, not even his granddaughter Jessica, who was very rude I might add but then she was a harlot even in high school. I remember her then with that Levins boy! But I found his grave and he died in 1918.”
Well thank God. That is a load off. How can this conversation get any more fascinating now that I finally know whatever became of that sixth-cousin who treated my doomed great-grandaunt 103 years ago. I was thinking of him just never and saying to myself “Tresvant Maharajah [my little name for myself], I wonder if Tanner Gray is still around and if he thinks Aunt Anna Jane is going to get any better or if she’s gone for good” and if perchance he’s dead I would dearly love to go plant a mess of peas and Black-Eyed Susans on his grave, BUT I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS! OH WHY FATES, WHY! But now I can do that.
I hold the line and realize there’s been silence for a while.
“How are you doing Lou Ida?”
“Oh I can’t complain” she says as preamble to fifteen minutes of complaints. Then the conversation turns to the old gossip and I, sincerely and very politely, attempt to explain that I really don’t care. Even the stuff about me and my mother has gotten old.
“It’s been 20 years… I have trouble even putting names with faces in my memory anymore” that part’s a lie actually “and so… I’m afraid you’re wasting your breath telling me about any developments as they’re just names.”
“Well I know one you’ll remember. That woman…”
“I seem to remember a ‘that woman’, yes. Which one? There was a whole family of them if I remember correctly.”
“Only one who tried to set you up in a sexually incriminating photograph with the granddaughter she wished to promote so she could steal your birthright.”
That does narrow it down considerably I’ll admit. There can’t be more than a dozen or so women who match that description at any particular time.
I find myself wondering if Lou Ida has gone senile or if this is just the same-crazy as always but older. But I’ll admit that my interest is piqued, so I ask
“Pardon? Which that woman was that.”
“Jeanine. That Cajun whore from alligator hell who wished to trade her six year old granddaughter’s hymen for your grandmother’s house, that that woman.”
Ah of course, Miss Jeanine Thatwoman of the Cajun Alligator Hellwhore Thatwomans. Good family those Cajun Alligator Hellwhore Thatwomans, I won’t hear anybody say they wasn’t, way better than those snooty Clap Infected Shoeselling Thatwomans from over in Rivertown.
But shit, Jeanine, I’d have sold you Grandmother’s house for $50 and a gift certificate to Captain D’s back in those days. To this day I’ve never had any use for a hymen, six years old or otherwise; I don’t even know what I’d do with it. Maybe bronze it and use it as a pendant or something…
But I will admit I was intrigued and said
“Pray continue.”
for this promised to be good.
Is this where you cuss her out, jus’ like yer Daddy woulda?
Can’t wait for the next installment…
And I know a woman much like Lou Ida, but without the accent and the religion. :eek:
I am sooooo anxious to read this next installment. I have voices in my head for each and every character. Lou Ida’s is by far the most disturbing one. :eek:
How long must we wait! Oh, the agony!
Gaa! I hate being left hanging. sigh
Well, there was no need to ask, as you were obviously conducting an hideous pagan ritual.
You have a wonderful sense of literary timing. When I read that interjection, I suddenly realized I’d lost track of the fact that I was reading an autobiography and slipped into a fiction-reading mindset, if that makes any sense. It just snapped me right back.
I’ve read or heard somewhere along the line that people in the Middle Ages wore small scraps of cloth covered in blood somewhere on their bodies so that all the fleas and other vermin would congregate in one place and leave the rest of their body pretty much alone. I don’t know the truth of this, but I have a theory that women like Jeanine exist for a similar purpose to humanity. Dysfunction and tragedy and horror gravitated to her so that many other people would have lives with fewer unmanageable horrors.
The one thing Lou Ida called her that is pretty much accurate to my knowledge is Alligator Country Cajun. If I remember correctly her father was Cajun and her mother was something else, and she was born in a tiny swampy town in Louisiana where there were still a good many Acadian French speaking natives and as a kid she learned how to find and raid alligator nests for eggs and hatchlings. I don’t know if she was ever a whore but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me as she’s from the class where one does what one has to and who knows. She’d definitely married for money once and that’s a type of whoring I suppose.
When she was still a child her father moved the family to New Orleans, by which I’m talking not about the souvenir Hurricane glasses from Pat O’Brien’s and people on wrought iron balconies catching throws from Mardi Gras floats New Orleans as about the Hurricane Katrina victims and people being shot to death on their cinder block balconies from stray gunfire between gangs and the mafia New Orleans, though both had no shortage of cicadas and banana plants. They were very poor and she soon found out that tourists weren’t and one story about her childhood I remember is this: whenever she and her brothers would return to their hometown to visit old folks they’d raid the gator nests, steal the hatchlings, bring them back to New Orleans and sell them to tourists in the French Quarter as “Pygmy Alligators! Genuine bonafide guaranteed pygmy alligators! They’ll never grow more than 18 inches long! $12 each, two for $20!” A local mafia capo thought the whole idea was absolutely hysterical and even let them set up shop outside of his club on Royal St. for free, and in a good season she’d clear hundreds of dollars (for a good gator nest can have dozens of hatchlings). When her father learned what she was doing he whipped her in front of her mother and told her how evil she was but secretly began building little wire and scrap wood cages to be sold as accessories for a few dollars each (for you need something to take the pygmy gator back to Los Angeles or Cleveland or Manhattan or Atlanta in, don’t you? And this is just $3!)
For those who may not know it, there is of course no such thing as a pygmy alligator. She said when she heard the urban legends about alligators in the sewers of NYC later she cried because she felt personally responsible. I asked her once what she did with the baby gators when they got too big to sell to tourists and she told me “We never had any that got that big… we usually sold out in two or three days!” Well, ecologically evil, but it made for some good Christmases in her family and a light-in-the-eyes memory thirty years later for her, and for women like Jeanine that may even be judged by the gods to be worth a few flushed gators and devoured sewer workers.
Jeanine was a bad girl early, no amount of nuns at school or crying from her mother could fix it, and while she says she had the best parents of any of her friends- just terribly poor- she fell in with the bad crowd. She got pregnant when she was an adolescent and gave it up for adoption, then again a couple of years later and her father and the boyfriend’s father, both old school, insisted on a marriage even though there was a general hatred between Cajun families like hers and Italian families like his. She was about 17 when this one was born, soon had four kids with him, lived in the slums with her in-laws and hated her abusive husband with an absolutely passion. Luckily he joined the service and was sent to Vietnam.
Jeanine: Yeah, my mother-in-law hated me. I mean hated- none of this sit-com style changing smart-asseries stuff but hate. I was always that Coon-Ass slut who stole her baby ya know? And she even hated my kids but her priest and all told her it was her Christian duty and all to take us into her house which was this falling down but f*ckin’ huge home by the Canal with her own daughters and their bastard babies but that was okay you see cause I’d evidently raped Mike, her son, to make mine. But here’s the thing, when Vietnam got hot and heavy and they started showing all the footage on TV and all, I’d hold my babies on my lap and I’d get the oldest ones, Susie and Jenna, only two talking then, the twins too little, well, I’d say ‘girls, you two pray with your momma, pray with momma….’ And Mike’s fuckin’ mother she’s all ‘well at least you got some decent in you to pray that your babies father will survive’ and I wouldn’t say a word to her, just to God. She’d hear me and the girls praying ‘Please God, please let your child Mike Gianetti be among the dead in that picture… please let Jeanine Gianetti be a widow and her babies provided for with government dead GI benefits and not have him come home… please God in the name of your son and of Saints An…” and that’s when Momma Gianetti would come running up with the broom or the mop handle and beating the hell out of me and the girls. Oh hell, one time me and a bunch of her daughters and me were talking how we’d kill our men and make it look natural and I won cause I said I’d [for obvious reasons not included, even though it involves Louisiana climate, but it would probably work] and that would make it look just like alcohol pois’nin’, you know, and here comes Momma Gianetti with a wine bottle and whap! And look here, you can still see the scar right here in my head….”
And of course it’s lost under coarse black hair filled with flakes of stuff until you see it and then it’s actually pretty brutal.
Mike came home from Vietnam. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t work out. These things happen sometimes.
She lost custody of her kids to her husband and the next few years are all pretty bad: topless dancing, petty grift and stuff to stay alive. For a while (I can’t believe I remember all this stuff- I even remember her stories about why she hated Mickey Rooney so much) she was dancing in a titty-bar by day and then working in a White Castle (similar to a Krystals- a cheap burger joint) frequented largely by mobsters at night “and the tips there… ooh, lemme tell you… people aren’t even supposed to tip in a White Castle but these goombahs would come in and get two dollars worth of hamburgers and tip you ten for brining it to their table!” and that’s where she met her second husband. He was a Cuban refugee, a middle aged mobster under Batista who was working for a New Orleans mobster, and very secretly gay and catching flack for it. He asked her to be his wife and shield- all she had to do was live with him, look the other way at his live-in-boytoys and occasionally complain to other mob wives about how much he screwed around with teenaged girls [which of course he didn’t]. (SAY HELLO TO MY LEETLE BEARD!)
“Shit, I’d had five kids by the time I was twenty-one, I sure didn’t want anymore, and I sure wanted to quit those titty and burger jobs, so hell yeah I married him” and for a while life was pretty good. True, her husband was a monster, a made man (I’m picturing Joe Pesci even though he was Cuban), but his victims weren’t her for a change. Also, her oldest daughter was having lots of problems and came back to live with her, and this let her be a stay-at-home mom. And there was money.
“You know what it’s like to have a momma who worked hard all her life and you can look at her and tell how hard she worked but she never had a dress didn’t come from St. Vincent De Paul or Volunteers of America or maybe if she was lucky and times were good the bargain bin at some dimestore, and you take her to one of those snooty bitch stores in the quarter or Metairie and say ‘Momma, you’d look so good in that organza and she says ‘baby, that thing’s $50, all my clothes together wouldn’t cost that’ and you say ‘but idn’t it pretty’ and she says ‘it’s the prettiest thing I ever saw’ and that evening you take her to a restaurant so nice you got your own waiter does no table but you and her menu don’t have the prices on it even and then with dessert you get the waiter to bring out that dress all wrapped in a box? They say money don’t bring happiness, well… maybe not long haul, but for the here and now oh yes it do.”
Unfortunately her husband had a drug problem and “problems at the office” that he started taking out on those at home. And she started an affair with his live-in-boytoy who she learned was also diddling her twelve year old daughter, who was pregnant by him [she miscarried] and that all went to hell and soon she was living back in the tenements. “But it was good while it lasted.”
I don’t have time to go into all of Jeanine’s history but let’s just say “colorful and terrifying” were two things that didn’t begin to describe it. To somebody who’d lived his entire life on a farm in Weokahatchee and whose exposure to the truly iniquitous was limited to TV with censored violence and bleeped language, I couldn’t hear enough of these tales, and she damned sure didn’t mind talking about it. Let’s just say that ultimately she hooked up with Rob whose story I won’t go into save to say that he was from the Irish slums of New Orleans, tried his dead level damnedest to be a tough guy mafia soldier for the Sicilians and ultimately got his ass and other things handed to him, and eventually he and Jeanine had to flee to Montgomery. (Jeanine and Rob are not their real names, incidentally, but I have some doubts that the ones we knew them by were their real names as well, but that’s a whole bunch of other stories; Rob’s “strangely sweetest” present to me and my mother was a dead baby [not the actual baby or anything that gross, but- if you know how fake identities were established at one time {much harder to use that method today} you may have a clue on what I mean.]).
So Jeanine and Rob landed in Montgomery. Rob was an exceptionally garrulous fellow who unfortunately thought he was freaking brilliant (he really wasn’t stupid exactly, he just was about 50 or 80 IQ points under what he thought he was) and this kept him from getting any kind of break, and he and Jeanine both had records, and they ended up in a circle you wouldn’t believe existed in a city the size of Montgomery where the Thenardiers of Les Miz would have been the closest thing they had to royalty or patron saints. Families that had full-time welfare workers, almost, or who when you met them and heard their story you thought to yourself “Oh God… I remember that from the papers!” Evil and pathetic people. Jeanine and Rob were among them of course.
And Jeanine’s daughter Susie was a total oxygen thief whose chief hobbies were heroin, reproduction and theft. Jeanine had two grandchildren by the time Susie was 18, both of them angelically beautiful strangely, and she and Rob took unofficial custody of them when Susie’s boyfriend was abusing them. When she had her third child Rob and Jeanine literally brought it home from the hospital, another beautiful child with separate paternity from either of the other two. They managed to get ADC checks started and get official custody and kick Susie out (she returned to New Orleans) and while I do not romanticize or exonerate Rob and or Jeanine one thing I honestly believe: they worshipped those children and truly wanted the best for them. That’s why they rented my grandmother’s house when we listed it for $100 per month- they wanted them as far away as their very limited means could get from the trash they knew in Montgomery.
When they rented the place we gave them the first month free for cleaning it out. My grandmother had left it piled floor to ceiling with crap: newspapers, syrup cans, old clothes, broken furniture- it was worthy of the Collyer Brothers. Rob and Jeanine made a bonfire that lasted for days just of the crap. There’s no telling how much cash was burned or that they found and secreted because my grandmother had a bad habit of hiding money, but the place was so disgusting and crammed full that only the books were ever checked for money. (Speaking of books have I mentioned that Jeanine was one of the best read high school dropouts I’ve ever met? Raw intelligence was not something she lacked at all.)
Anyway, they paid rent when they could which was cyclical and then not at all. Even had they paid the full $100 per month it wouldn’t have gone very far as our expenses (mortgage, utilities, etc.) were over $1000 and our income was $400. Gotterdammerung was the name of the game for the last couple of years up there. But they by-god earned their keep in other ways, which included looking after Carrie when we had to get away, lying through their teeth to social workers when somebody accused us anonymously of abusing the old lady (a total lie and like anybody would have known if we had- nobody ever came to see her!), helping us hide the car, holding a gun on the sheriff the first time he tried to repossess and other little things good neighbors do for each other.
I never much cared for Rob. It wasn’t what you’d think- I didn’t hate him or find him disgusting for the reasons I would when we had money because by this time I was well aware that poverty and circumstance are to ethics what fire and bellows are to iron, but he was just so full of himself and convinced of his own intelligence for a guy who was living in a dump and that on charity, but Jeanine, who this is the completion of a description of for this thread but isn’t the beginning of a description of for purposes of understanding that time of my life and my mother’s, I will always feel a debt to. Were I to see her today walking down an opposite street in Washington D.C., dressed like and probably living as bag lady but still somehow walking a goat and talking to herself, and if I were wearing my best outfit and with a group of people I really wanted to impress, on my honor I would cross five lanes of traffic to walk over, hug her neck, I’d give her every penny I had on me and I’d spend as much time as I could spare thanking her and catching up on old times.
But in interest of total honesty I’ll admit that I would never give her my phone number, address or contact information. I’d never get rid of her.
But the most important thing to understand about Jeanine for purposes of the Lou Ida cuss out is this: while I don’t put anything past her as far as things she’d have done to protect herself or her grandkids, I also believe completely that she truly loved me and my mother, saw in us kindred spirits (which in a way we were), would have done anything she could legal or otherwise to help us (which she did) and that she would never have harmed us even for her own gain (which of course Lou Ida accused her of as will be relayed later).
And what happened to Rob is truly terrifying, but that’ll be in the next posting. Let’s just say it’s one of those “worse things than death” things and I’ll even include a (work safe) picture that will make the point.
You know, reading a Sampiro story is like exploring a big old marvelous house. Every room is fascinating, and best of all, there are so many doors.
happy sigh
I’ve had some great neighbors but never any who would off to hold a gun on the sheriff. Ok, so maybe I’ve never had occasion to need a neighbor to hold a gun on the sheriff, but still… 
I’d love to have this info if you don’t mind.
Sampiro there is nothing I can say that hasn’t been said many times and better than I could but…Welcome back. I am truely glad to see you back.
Here ya go:
1 Qt heavy cream
1 vanilla bean
10 large egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt
Garnish:
1/2 cup sugar for carmalizing
fresh berries or cookies
Pre heat oven to 325°F
In a medium saucepan combine cream and split, scraped vanilla bean. heat to scald (simmer) then remove from heat.
Combine yolks, 1/2 cup sugar and salt in a large bowl whisk together, then add cream mixture. Strain through a fine sieve, discard vanilla bean.
Fill 6 ramekins and place them in a water bath half way up the sides, in the oven.
Bake for 25-45 minutes or until the custard is just set (the custard moves uniformly when moved.) 1 inch ramekins take about 25 minutes, 2 inch, 45 minutes.
Avoid over baking.
Whwn just set, remove from water bath, cool then place in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, overnight is best.
Pre heat broiler. Sprinkle an even layer of sugar on the tops of each custard. Put them on a cookie sheet, on the top oven rack about 2-3 minutes or until sugar has carmalized to a golden brown.
Garnish with fruit or cookies, serve immediately.
Serves 6
I took two days away from the dope, just so that I could save up installments to read tonight. We look forward to more.
And it’s so easy to get lost.