Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules...
Jim Roberts
[...]
AOL is for morons, my dear.
No, I wouldn't call it that either. and besides we're in British Summer Time
now. part of me would want to blame stupid old aol, but for fear of being
called a racist by alt.poly types....
[...]
Indeed? I like a man who can drink more than me. And one who knows his
Brigitte from his Bardot would be good too.Like Col. Jack D. Ripper (Dr Strangelove) I take my grain alcohol with rainwater to preserve my precious bodily fluids. There has been some falling off since 1964, since Katya always called me the Goomeister.
[...]
Well, sad, indeed. In 1st grade in Des Moines, Iowa my best friend was a black kid who amazingly could beat me by inches in a 100-yd dash. I never won, so he became my best friend for this and many other reasons. He also liked Blanche, a snot-nosed girl with torn dresses and a wicked sense of humor.
What's British Bulldog?Oh, it's another one of those playground rough and tumble games that we used
to play in school. Probably wouldn't be allowed in these days of
paedophilophobia and political correctness. But then when i was a child we
used to play knock-down-ginger in our street and climb into old people's
gardens naked and play. That would probably be unheard of in london now, at
least in nice places like Chiswick for sure.
I told my black nurse about my friend Harold Kennedy, and she said she would try to track him down. She was like, what is this white/black boy doing here in my ward as a white boy? She paid me a special visit before I left and looked at me funny. All I could say was, it's all true. There is a racial divide, but there is electricity across this divide.
I was forbidden to see Blanche or Harold. But if you have any idea about me, which my mother didn't, this was the wrong approach. Twice my mother and I were evicted from rooming houses because I brought Harold over to play.
My mother hit on the effective solution of sending me off to a farm where I had duties for the summer (I was just 7). The farmer's boy and I played "nekedy" in the forest, for which we were reported by the older sister and punished. But no matter, the serious thing that happened was a near death,
Tommy, who shot himself to death in St Louis 20 years ago [I also have a half brother who shot himself to death 15 years ago], and I built a club house, with a long tunnel and a big room, into the Iowa shale along a cowpath. A week after we built it, after a rainstorm, we went out to find the whole thing collapsed. Oh. We could have died. The whole point was that no adults could know. We would not have been found.
We thought about this the rest of the summer, and reached no conclusion. Parents cannot be told, but is death acceptable?
The older sister, Carol, fell in love with me and did not want to surrender me to the flight to Alaska and a new marriage to my mother. There was a scene. The last I heard of this beautiful young thing was that she weighed 300 lb and was living in a trailer at the end of a road in New Mexico.
The last I saw of the parents was in the early 90s. She was as deep into Alzheimer's as it is possible to go, and he was just waiting for her, for him to go. They are gone.
I want to bring them back to life in a little way. He taught me how to milk a cow, and how to respect a cow, and especially how to respect a pig. Once I was tearing through the pasture at a speed only known in the comics, when I hit a stick and fell face-first into a fresh cow-pie, was covered with it from face to shoes. I knew I was dead, as I could not make it to the bathroom dripping with cow shit.
There was much laughter at my expense, but then they merely hosed me off in the yard. What could have been simpler? To see my rescuer in the last stages of Alzheimer's just crushed me.
Then I left for Alaska and never heard from Harold or Blanche ever again.
[...]
love
jimbat